Art Np2

"The Laughter of Women" By Lisel Muller The laughter of women sets fire to the Halls of Injustice and the false evidence burns to a beautiful white lightness It rattles the Chambers of Congress and forces the windows wide open so the fatuous speeches can fly out The laughter of women wipes the mist from the spectacles of the old; it infects them with a happy flu and they laugh as if they were young again Prisoners held in underground cells imagine that they see daylight when they remember the laughter of women It runs across water that divides, and reconciles two unfriendly shores like flares that signal the news to each other What a language it is, the laughter of women, high-flying and subversive. Long before law and scripture we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

Claude Monet, The Regatta at Argenteuil, 1872, oil on canvas Monet Refuses the Operation Doctor, you say that 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, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don't know each other, as if islands were not the lost ...