Quotes from Lisel Mueller

Now in the thriving season of love when the bud relents into flower, your love turned absence has turned once more, and if my comforts fall soft as rain on her flutters, it is because love grows by what it remembers of love

In winter we close the windows and read Chekhov, nearly weeping for his world. What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.

Heartland Now that we've given our hearts away With the bric-a-brac, we want them back. Now we look for them secondhand, Someone else's, in the old songs, The slowly unfolding novels We never had time for. Hearts That taught themselves to fly; …overstuffed hearts, still leaking Downy secrets like feathers. We want someone to say, 'I give you my heart', meaning, 'Summer and winter', meaning 'All my time in the this world'…

Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine.

By the time I arrive at evening, / they have just settled down to rest; / already invisible, they are turning / into the dreamwork of the trees….

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things

I will not return to a universe of objects that do not know each other, as if islands were not the long lost children of one great continent

Still, when your truthful eyes, your keen, attentive stare, endow the vacuous slut with royalty, when you match her soul to her shimmering hair, what can she do but rise to your imagined throne? And what can I, but see beyond the world that is, when, faithful, you insist I have the golden key-- and learn from you once more the terror and the bliss, the world as it might be?