POETRY ... Lisel MUELLER

“In November”
Lisa Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
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.

Reproduced from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems
by Lisel Mueller (Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

MUELLER Lisel [1924-] Poet. Born Lisel Neumann in Hamburg, Germany. Poetry Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (1996: winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry); Learning to Play by Ear (1990); Waving from Shore (1989); Second Language (1986); The Need to Hold Still (1980: winner of the 1981 National Book Award); Voices from the Forest (1977); The Private Life (1975); Dependencies (1965) Translation Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s Circe’s Mountain (1990)