Two Poems by Lisel Mueller

Alive Together

Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard's woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master's bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary's friend. I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who--but for endless ifs--
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.

Hope 

It hovers in dark corners

before the lights are turned on,

it shakes sleep from its eyes

and drops from mushroom gills,

it explodes in the starry heads

of dandelions turned sages,

it sticks to the wings of green angels

that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye

of the many-eyed potato,

it lives in each earthworm segment

surviving cruelty,

it is the motion that runs

from the eyes to the tail of a dog,

it is the mouth that inflates the lungs

of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift

we cannot destroy in ourselves,

the argument that refutes death,

the genius that invents the future,

all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear

not to betray one another;

it is in this poem, trying to speak.

Lisel Mueller is the author of 10 books of poetry: Among them are Dependencies, Louisiana State University 1965; The Private Life, Louisiana State University 1975; The Need to Hold Still, Louisiana State University 1980; Second Language, Louisiana State University 1986; Waving from Shore, Louisiana State University 1989; Alive Together, Louisiana State University 1996. Essays and Early Poems: Learning to Play by Ear, Juniper Press 1990. She has also published several volumes of translation. Among her many awards include a Pulitzer Prize for her collection, Alive Together in 1996. She was the Illinois Poet Laureate in 1987.

Her poems have been published in various periodicals such as Poetry, Paris Review, Atlantic, Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, New England Review and many others.  


Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924 - February 21, 2020)