The Private Life

Poems

Lisel Mueller

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1981
• Print ISBN: 9780807101711
• eBook ISBN: 9780807167991
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Lisel Mueller's poems are deeply felt and give pleasure because of their truth conveyed in sensuous terms. I found myself earmarking numbers of poems because they were compelling, satisfying, each a thing in itself."—Richard Eberhart
The forty-three poems in this award winning collection by Lisel Mueller are written with a sense of history, an awareness of the inescapable changes taking place in our century and the effect on how we see our lives.
Each of the poems speaks from a separate moment of experience. Each of them in its own way, celebrates the autonomy of the self, the mysteries of intimacy, growth, and feeling, and the struggle against what one writer has called the "ongoing assault from without to be something palpable and identifiable."

III

A wish, come true, is life.
—Randall Jarrell

The Private Life

What happens, happens in silence:

The man from New York City
feels himself going insane
and flies to Brazil to rest,

The piano student in Indiana
lovingly gathers the prune pits
Horowitz left on his plate
the only time he ate breakfast there,

My daughter daydreams of marriage,
she has suddenly grown
three inches taller than I,

And now, this icy morning,
we find another tree,
an aspen, doubled over,
split in two at the waist:
no message, no suicide note.
* * *

Fruit market:
age-spotted avocados,
lemons with goose flesh;
navel oranges,
pears with flushed cheeks;
apples like buttocks,
pineapples like stockades,
coconut heads with instructions:
‘Pierce the eyes with an awl,
allowing the milk to run out,
then tap hard with a hammer
until the outer covering cracks—“

life, our violent history,
lies speechless and mild in these bins.
* * *

We are being eaten by words.
My face is smeared with headlines.
My lungs, blue tubes, are always on.
You come home smelling of printer’s ink.

The teletype is a dragon’s mouth;
ripped out, its tongue grows back
at the speed of sound:

5,000 tons of explosives were dropped
The terrorist wore a business suit
His late model Triumph was found overturned
She said she had taken fertility drugs
The boy stood on the burning deck
The girl’s body was found in a cornfield
The President joked with newsmen
The two youths were killed execution-style
The National Safety Council reported
A spokesman for the hospital said
The blond actress disclosed
YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE, YOUR CHILDREN ARE GONE

Stop it. What happens,
happens in silence:
in a red blood cell,
a curl in the brain,
in the ignorant ovum,
the switched-on nerves;

it happens in eyes before the scream,
in memory when it boils over,
in the ravine of conscience,
in the smile that says, Come to bed.

Today—my snow-capped birthday—
our red hibiscus is blooming again.
Months of refusal;
now one sudden silent flower,
one inscrutable life.

On a Photograph of
Randall Jarrell

Thick beard, ruled forehead, laugh lines
above high cheekbones, slender wrists and hands
writing; this much of you I see. Also
a strip of wall and curtain. The rest
I imagine: Elektra is obsessed voice
on the phonograph, a sketch of the Brothers Grimm,
Rilke’s New Poems with notes in the margins,
visits from children, your girls—always girls,
for gentleness was your style and your reprieve
from Hansel and Gretel’s forest, which must be
just outside. Girls and survivors,
and bats, whose slandered faces you redeemed
from our disgust. Bats love their babies too.
O waker of true princesses, I love you.
* * * *
A death has come
between the lines of this poem.
I look at you differently now,
discover the downward slant of your eyes,
the long-practiced patience which shows in the way
you hold your arms. Elektra is singing
unbearable music, her ecstasy blooms like a wound
now her brother is dead. What are we except
killers and sufferers? Still, you quietly walked
into your death one night in North Carolina.
A wish, come true, is life, you said. Having had your wish,
you blew out the birthday candles all at once.

The Late News

For months, numbness
in the face of broadcasts;
I stick to my resolution
not to bleed
when my blood helps no one.

For months, I accept
my smooth skin,
my gratuitous life as my due;
then suddenly, a crack—
the truth seeps through like acid,
a child without eyes to weep with
weeps for me, and I bleed
as if I were still human.

Divorce

We never saw her except
flat against the big trunk.

Now that it’s cut away
we see she has
branches, leaves, tiny blossoms.

There are new shoots
and, on old leaves, white blotches.
Tart red berries grow from the shock
of living out in the open.

A Nude by Edward Hopper

For Margaret Gaul

The light
drains me of what I might be,
a man’s dream
of heat and softness;
or a painter’s
—breasts cozy pigeons,
arms gently curved
by a temperate noon.

I am
blue veins, a scar,
a patch of lavender cells,
used thighs and shoulders;
my calves
are as scant as my cheeks,
my hips won’t plump
small, shimmering pillows:

but this body
is home, my childhood
is buried here, my sleep
rises and sets inside,
desire
crested and wore itself thin
between these bones—
I live here.

In Praise of Surfaces

1
When I touch you
with hands or mouth,
I bless your skin,
the sweet rind
through which you breathe,
the only part
I can possess. Even
that branch of you
which moves inside me
does not deliver your soul:
one flesh is all
the mystery we were promised.

2
To learn about the invisible,
look at the visible, says
the Talmud. I have seen you
for so long you are
ground into the walls,
so long I can’t remember
your face when you’re away,
so long I have to look
each night when you come home
at the tall surprise you bring
me, time and time again....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• III