Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96, on What Gives Meaning to Our Temporary Lives – The Marginalian

“When you realize that you are a mortal, you also see the beauty of the future. You love the Time you will never see,” poet, artist, and philosopher Etel Adnan commented as he saw the imperfection and passing down of the mountain. “By the grace of random chance, combined with the laws of nature,” the poetic physicist Brian Greene wrote in his beautiful meditation on our search for meaning in the cold, “we exist.”

And of course we are not.

We are dying. All of us – atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, mountain to sea – you and me. The dual awareness of our impossible life and our inevitable death is what allows us to continue the interlude with love and beauty, with poetry and fairy tales and poetry, with a familiar connection with Nina Simone. That is what shows how fleeting and empty and resentful of all our anger and blame and resentment in the end – what urges us, instead, to “leave something sweet and something in the mouth of the world.”

That's what happened next, well Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924–February 21, 2020) – one of the truest, most insightful poets of our time – explores with great wisdom and majesty disguised as tenderness in the poem “Immortality” from his last collection of poems, a Pulitzer-winning masterpiece. We Live Together (public library).

IMMORTALITY
by Lisel Mueller

Nobuhle's castle in sleep
the clock is ticking for a hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to earth.
As well as the kitchen staff,
who do not tire the eyes.
The cook's right hand, raised
century ago,
completes its downward arc
in the left ear of the kitchen boy;
a boy's strong vocal cords
I finally let go
those who are stuck, who are always crying,
and a fly, tied mid-sink
over strawberry pie,
fulfills its eternal mission
then into the sweet, red sparkling water.

I had a book when I was a child
with a picture of that scene.
I was too young to notice
how the fear continues, how
fear-inducing rage continues,
that its trajectory cannot be changed
even if it is broken, it is only disturbed.
My attention was on the fly;
that this body is thin
with its transparent wings
and the life span of one human day
it still wants its own share
of pleasure, after a century.

(Two centuries earlier, William Blake explored the same eternal subject though the same creature in his short poem “The Fly.”)

In the front matter of this wonderful book, where the epigraph often appeared, Mueller offers a short poem that becomes a kind of chorus for the whole collection, but which stands out as a particularly harmonious counterpart to “Immortality”:

PAST
by Lisel Mueller

How quickly refined honey
of the afternoon light
flowing into the darkness

and the closed bud retracts
its special mystery
to stand out:

as if there is, there is
to be lost
and be valuable.

Complete these transition pieces completely We Live Together and scientist Alan Lightman on our longing for immortality in a universe dominated by decay, Pico Iyer on discovering the beauty of imperfection, and Marcus Aurelius on death as the key to living life to the fullest, then revisiting Barbara Ras's poignant, moving, balanced poem, “You Can't Have It All” fills our imperfection with meaning, “Faster Than Light.”