Jackie's Birthday

My sister, Jackie, died of brain cancer in January, 2003, and I brought at least a dozen vases of beautiful cut flowers home after the memorial service. I thought a houseful of flowers would brighten my spirits, but they only made me sad. Already, some the petals were going brown at the edges. We had spent a year and three months watching Jackie die, and I simply couldn’t stand the thought of watching these small, inevitable deaths now. So I took all the flowers to the basement and stripped the petals onto cookie sheets I set on the pool table: roses, daisies, lilies, lavender, snapdragons—every kind of flower, every color. Over the next weeks, watching them fade, dry, and shrivel up, I tried (I’m still trying) to believe that Jackie was really gone.

Her birthday was April 13 and, that first year after her death, my other sister, my daughters, and a group of Jackie’s women friends gathered for a dinner of all her favorite foods. I divided the flower petals, put them in glittery see-through bags, tied them with ribbons, and attached a little card to each with this quote from Jane Austen: “Where shall we see a better daughter or a kinder sister or a truer friend?” Which exactly describes the kind of person Jackie was. There was a bag for each of the women—and two extras, to be tucked into her sons' brides’ bouquets someday.

We’ve celebrated Jackie's birthday every year since then. Tonight, we ate pizza and birthday cake and toasted her--which made me miss her all over again.

I love this poem by Lisel Mueller, which I read at Jackie’s funeral, and find it more and more true as the years go by.

AFTER YOUR DEATH

The first time we said your name
you broke through the flat crust of your grave
and rose, a movable statue,
walking and talking among us.

Since then you’ve grown a little.
We keep you slightly larger
than life-size, reciting bits of your story,
our favorite odds and ends.
Of all your faces we’ve chosen one
for you to wear, a face wiped clean
of sadness. Now you have no other.

You’re in our power. Do we
terrify you, do you wish
for another face? Perhaps
you want to be left in darkness.

But you have no say in the matter.
As long as we live, we keep you
from dying your real death,
which is being forgotten. We say,
we don’t want to abandon you,
when we mean we can’t let you go.

Monet Refuses the Operation

I love this poem for the surprise of its premise. I love the intensity with which Mueller describes argues for the unexpected benefits that age and experience bring and how we only have to stop and look hard at the world find some balance for what we have lost


MONET REFUSES THE OPERATION

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end

Lisel Mueller

Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924 and immigrated to America at the age of 15. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Alive Together: New & Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1996. Other awards include the Lamont Poetry Prize (1975), the National Book Award (1981), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2002). She lives in Chicago.

TRY YOUR HAND AT A POEM
Using strong imagery and a strong, idiosyncratic voice, write a poem that makes a compelling argument for something that, at first glance, seems illogical—without naming what the narrator is arguing for or against. You may choose a famous person, as Mueller did, or an ordinary person, perhaps someone you know