What is it about Paris I

It must be a Musing Monday for me to even venture this question and “Magic” was the answer when I asked at my favourite hat and jewellery shop, owned by women who are delightfully chic and encourage me in my Parisian adventures.

Paris is magic.  I live by my senses there as I do nowhere else. I am happy in Paris as nowhere else. Moments are memories sinking deep beneath my skin. I sit and drink it all in with a smile as wide as Mona Lisa’s. I am satisfied here as nowhere else and satisfied is a magical place to be.

Soft warm sun; a colour palette that delights; simple foods filling me with respect and awe. A language of struggle but I find help along the way; gentle encounters are everywhere and the crazy encounters delight and linger.  I never feel lonely in Paris; the space between things holds me as if the beauty stretches, as if beauty holds of us together. Beauty is the misty air, the blue of the door, the flow of the Seine. The curve of the cobble, the spread of the butter, the crack of the bread. In Paris I drink the in-between. In Paris I am nourished as nowhere else. I live simply, being simply me.

Monet refuses the operation

extract from “Monet refuses the operation” by Lisa Mueller; the lilies of Giverny; lamps in London.

Doctor, you say, there are no haloes / around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration /caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life / to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish / the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon / does not exist and sky and water,

…

I will not return to a universe / of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children / of one great continent.

The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, / becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water / becomes lilac and mauve and yellow …