Romantics by Lisel Mueller
Romantics
Lisel MuellerJohannes Brahms and
Clara SchumannThe modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
MARGINALIA
Found an old notebook filled with poems I’ve collected over the years. Sitting in a quiet corner now. Going back in time now. Thinking of how I discovered them and why I liked them and what they meant to me.
ABOUT LISEL MUELLER
Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, on February 8, 1924, and came to the United States in 1939. She attended the University of Evansville in Indiana, where her father was a professor of French and German. Mueller’s books of poetry include Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Need to Hold Still (Louisiana State University Press, 1980), which received the National Book Award; and The… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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Michelle in NYC
I’m doing a page on Liesel for the last days of our Poetry Month….you must hear this…the only one I know of with herself reading her work:
http://youtu.be/dR1j-o_0x5A