Authors: Louise Glück
to show he's capable
of open affection.
My father used
the dog in the same way.
My son and I, we're the living
experts in silence.
Snow's sweeping the sky;
it shifts directions, going
first steadily down, then sideways.
3.
One thing you learn, growing up with my sister:
you learn that rules don't mean anything.
Sooner or later, whatever you're waiting to hear will get itself said.
It doesn't matter what it is:
I love you
or
I'll never speak to you again.
It all gets said, often in the same night.
Then you slip in, you take advantage. There are ways
to hold a person to what's been said; for example, by using the word
promise.
But you have to have patience; you have to be able to wait, to listen.
My niece knows that in time, with intelligence, she'll get everything she wants.
It's not a bad life. Of course, she has those gifts,
time and intelligence.
ANIMALS
My sister and I reached
the same conclusion:
the best way
to love us was to not
spend time with us.
It seemed that
we appealed
chiefly to strangers.
We had good clothes, good
manners in public.
In private, we were
always fighting. Usually
the big one finished
sitting on the little one
and pinching her.
The little one
bit: in forty years
she never learned
the advantage in not
leaving a mark.
The parents
had a credo: they didn't
believe in anger.
The truth was, for different reasons,
they couldn't bring themselves
to inflict pain. You should only hurt
something you can give
your whole heart to. They preferred
tribunals: the child
most in the wrong could choose
her own punishment.
My sister and I
never became allies,
never turned on our parents.
We had
other obsessions: for example,
we both felt there were
too many of us
to survive.
We were like animals
trying to share a dry pasture.
Between us, one tree, barely
strong enough to sustain
a single life.
We never moved
our eyes from each other
nor did either touch
one thing that could
feed her sister.
SAINTS
In our family, there were two saints,
my aunt and my grandmother.
But their lives were different.
My grandmother's was tranquil, even at the end.
She was like a person walking in calm water;
for some reason
the sea couldn't bring itself to hurt her.
When my aunt took the same path,
the waves broke over her, they attacked her,
which is how the Fates respond
to a true spiritual nature.
My grandmother was cautious, conservative:
that's why she escaped suffering.
My aunt's escaped nothing;
each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.
Still, she won't experience
the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:
where it touches land, it must turn to violence.
YELLOW DAHLIA
My sister's like a sun, like a yellow dahlia.
Daggers of gold hair around the face.
Gray eyes, full of spirit.
I made an enemy of a flower:
now, I'm ashamed.
We were supposed to be opposites:
one fair, like daylight.
One different, negative.
If there are two things
then one must be better,
isn't that true? I know now
we both thought that, if what children do
can really be called thinking.
I look at my sister's daughter,
a child so like her,
and I'm ashamed: nothing justifies
the impulse to destroy
a smaller, a dependent life.
I guess I knew that always.
That's why I had to hurt
myself instead:
I believed in justice.
We were like day and night,
one act of creation.
I couldn't separate
the two halves,
one child from the other.
COUSINS
My son's very graceful; he has perfect balance.
He's not competitive, like my sister's daughter.
Day and night, she's always practicing.
Today, it's hitting softballs into the copper beech,
retrieving them, hitting them again.
After a while, no one even watches her.
If she were any stronger, the tree would be bald.
My son won't play with her; he won't even ride bicycles with her.
She accepts that; she's used to playing by herself.
The way she sees it, it isn't personal:
whoever won't play doesn't like losing.
It's not that my son's inept, that he doesn't do things well.
I've watched him race: he's natural, effortlessâ
right from the first, he takes the lead.
And then he stops. It's as though he was born rejecting
the solitude of the victor.
My sister's daughter doesn't have that problem.
She may as well be first; she's already alone.
PARADISE
I grew up in a village: now
it's almost a city.
People came from the city, wanting
something simple, something
better for the children.
Clean air; nearby
a little stable.
All the streets
named after sweethearts or girl children.
Our house was gray, the sort of place
you buy to raise a family.
My mother's still there, all alone.
When she's lonely, she watches television.
The houses get closer together,
the old trees die or get taken down.
In some ways, my father's
close, too; we call
a stone by his name.
Now, above his head, the grass blinks,
in spring, when the snow has melted.
Then the lilac blooms, heavy, like clusters of grapes.
They always said
I was like my father, the way he showed
contempt for emotion.
They're the emotional ones,
my sister and my mother.
More and more
my sister comes from the city,
weeds, tidies the garden. My mother
lets her take over: she's the one
who cares, the one who does the work.
To her, it looks like countryâ
the clipped lawns, strips of colored flowers.
She doesn't know what it once was.
But I know. Like Adam,
I was the firstborn.
Believe me, you never heal,
you never forget the ache in your side,
the place where something was taken away
to make another person.
CHILD CRYING OUT
You're asleep now,
your eyelids quiver.
What son of mine
could be expected
to rest quietly, to live
even one moment
free of wariness?
The night's cold;
you've pushed the covers away.
As for your thoughts, your dreamsâ
I'll never understand
the claim of a mother
on a child's soul.
So many times
I made that mistake
in love, taking
some wild sound to be
the soul exposing itselfâ
But not with you,
even when I held you constantly.
You were born, you were far away.
Whatever those cries meant,
they came and went
whether I held you or not,
whether I was there or not.
The soul is silent.
If it speaks at all
it speaks in dreams.
SNOW
Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.
My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.
TERMINAL RESEMBLANCE
When I saw my father for the last time, we both did the same thing.
He was standing in the doorway to the living room,
waiting for me to get off the telephone.
That he wasn't also pointing to his watch
was a signal he wanted to talk.
Talk for us always meant the same thing.
He'd say a few words. I'd say a few back.
That was about it.
It was the end of August, very hot, very humid.
Next door, workmen dumped new gravel on the driveway.
My father and I avoided being alone;
we didn't know how to connect, to make small talkâ
there didn't seem to be
any other possibilities.
So this was special: when a man's dying,
he has a subject.
It must have been early morning. Up and down the street
sprinklers started coming on. The gardener's truck
appeared at the end of the block,
then stopped, parking.
My father wanted to tell me what it was like to be dying.
He told me he wasn't suffering.
He said he kept expecting pain, waiting for it, but it never came.
All he felt was a kind of weakness.
I said I was glad for him, that I thought he was lucky.
Some of the husbands were getting in their cars, going to work.
Not people we knew anymore. New families,
families with young children.
The wives stood on the steps, gesturing or calling.
We said goodbye in the usual way,
no embrace, nothing dramatic.
When the taxi came, my parents watched from the front door,
arm in arm, my mother blowing kisses as she always does,
because it frightens her when a hand isn't being used.
But for a change, my father didn't just stand there.
This time, he waved.
That's what I did, at the door to the taxi.
Like him, waved to disguise my hand's trembling.
LAMENT
Suddenly, after you die, those friends
who never agreed about anything
agree about your character.
They're like a houseful of singers rehearsing
the same score:
you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.
No harmony. No counterpoint. Except
they're not performers;
real tears are shed.
Luckily, you're dead; otherwise
you'd be overcome with revulsion.
But when that's passed,
when the guests begin filing out, wiping their eyes
because, after a day like this,
shut in with orthodoxy,
the sun's amazingly bright,
though it's late afternoon, Septemberâ
when the exodus begins,
that's when you'd feel
pangs of envy.
Your friends the living embrace one another,
gossip a little on the sidewalk
as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze
ruffles the women's shawlsâ
this, this, is the meaning of
“a fortunate life”: it means
to exist in the present.
MIRROR IMAGE
Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing: even
my mother's voice couldn't make him
change or turn back
as he believed
that once you can't love another human being
you have no place in the world.
CHILDREN COMING HOME FROM SCHOOL
The year I started school, my sister couldn't walk long distances.
Every day, my mother strapped her in the stroller; then,
they'd walk to the corner.
That way, when school was over, I could see them; I could see my mother,
first a blur, then a shape with arms.
I walked very slowly, to appear to need nothing.
That's why my sister envied meâshe didn't know
you can lie with your face, your body.
She didn't see we were both in false positions.
She wanted freedom. Whereas I continued, in pathetic ways,
to covet the stroller. Meaning
all my life.
And, in that sense, it was lost on me: all the waiting, all my mother's
effort to restrain my sister, all the calling, the waving,
since, in that sense, I had no home any longer.
AMAZONS
End of summer: the spruces put out a few green shoots.
Everything else is goldâthat's how you know the end of the growing season.
A kind of symmetry between what's dying, what's just coming to bloom.
It's always been a sensitive time in this family.
We're dying out, too, the whole tribe.
My sister and I, we're the end of something.
Now the windows darken.
And the rain comes, steady and heavy.
In the dining room, the children draw.
That's what we did: when we couldn't see,
we made pictures.
I can see the end: it's the name that's going.
When we're done with it, it's finished, it's a dead language.
That's how language dies, because it doesn't need to be spoken.
My sister and I, we're like amazons,