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Palindrome

By Lisel Mueller b. 1924 Lisel Mueller

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American

Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am

putting on. It is evening in the antiworld

where she lives. She is forty-five years away

from her death, the hole which spit her out

into pain, impossible at first, later easing,

going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.

Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,

her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,

she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his

shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,

but their ardor increases. Soon her second child

will be young enough to fight its way into her

body and change its life to monkey to frog to

tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to

nothing. She is making a list:

Things I will need in the past

lipstick

shampoo

transistor radio

Sergeant Pepper

acne cream

five-year diary with a lock

She is eager, having heard about adolescent love

and the freedom of children. She wants to read

Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster

without getting sick. I think of her as she will

be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the

mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,

her other to open a jar. By now our lives should

have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have

passed one another like going and coming trains,

with both of us looking the other way.

Source: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

Biography

Poet and translator Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924. The daughter of teachers, her family was forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was 15. They immigrated to the US and settled in the Mid-west. Mueller attended the University of Evansville, where her father was a professor, and did her graduate study at Indiana University. Her collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont . . .

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