Authors: Louise Glück
with contempt for the communal, the ordinary; forever
consigned to solitude, the bleak solace of perception, to a future
completely dominated by the tragic, with no use for the immense will
but to fend it offâ
That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one's ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.
All the defenses, the spiritual rigidity, the insistent
unmasking of the ordinary to reveal the tragic,
were actually innocence of the world.
Meaning the partial, the shifting, the mutableâ
all that the absolute excludes. I sat in the dark, in the living room.
The birthday was over. I was thinking, naturally, about time.
I remember how, in almost the same instant,
my heart would leap up exultant and collapse
in desolate anguish. The leaping upâthe half I didn't countâ
that was happiness; that is what the word meant.
ANCIENT TEXT
How deeply fortunate my life, my every prayer
heard by the angels.
I asked for the earth; I received earth, like so much
mud in the face.
I prayed for relief from suffering; I received suffering.
Who can say my prayers were not heard? They were
translated, editedâand if certain
of the important words were left out or misunderstood, a crucial
article deleted, still they were taken in, studied like ancient texts.
Perhaps they
were
ancient texts, re-created
in the vernacular of a particular period.
And as my life was, in a sense, increasingly given over to prayer,
so the task of the angels was, I believe, to master this language
in which they were not as yet entirely fluent or confident.
And if I felt, in my youth, rejected, abandoned,
I came to feel, in the end, that we were, all of us,
intended as teachers, possibly
teachers of the deaf, kind helpers whose virtuous patience
is sustained by an abiding passion.
I understood at last! We were the aides and helpers,
our masterpieces strangely useful, like primers.
How simple life became then; how clear, in the childish errors,
the perpetual labor: night and day, angels were
discussing my meanings. Night and day, I revised my appeals,
making each sentence better and clearer, as though one might
elude forever all misconstruction. How flawless they becameâ
impeccable, beautiful, continuously misread. If I was, in a sense,
an obsessive staggering through time, in another sense
I was a winged obsessive, my moonlit
feathers were paper. I lived hardly at all among men and women;
I spoke only to angels. How fortunate my days,
how charged and meaningful the nights' continuous silence and opacity.
FROM A JOURNAL
I had a lover once,
I had a lover twice,
easily three times I loved.
And in between
my heart reconstructed itself perfectly
like a worm.
And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.
After a time, I realized I was living
a completely idiotic life.
Idiotic, wastedâ
And sometime later, you and I
began to correspond, inventing
an entirely new form.
Deep intimacy over great distance!
Keats to Fanny Brawne, Dante to Beatriceâ
One cannot invent
a new form in
an old character. The letters I sent remained
immaculately ironic, aloof
yet forthright. Meanwhile, I was writing
different letters in my head,
some of which became poems.
So much genuine feeling!
So many fierce declarations
of passionate longing!
I loved once, I loved twice,
and suddenly
the form collapsed: I was
unable to sustain ignorance.
How sad to have lost you, to have lost
any chance of actually knowing you
or remembering you over time
as a real person, as someone I could have grown
deeply attached to, maybe
the brother I never had.
And how sad to think
of dying before finding out
anything. And to realize
how ignorant we all are most of the time,
seeing things
only from the one vantage, like a sniper.
And there were so many things
I never got to tell you about myself,
things which might have swayed you.
And the photo I never sent, taken
the night I looked almost splendid.
I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow
kept hitting the mirror and coming back.
And the letters kept dividing themselves
with neither half totally true.
And sadly, you never figured out
any of this, though you always wrote back
so promptly, always the same elusive letter.
I loved once, I loved twice,
and even though in our case
things never got off the ground
it was a good thing to have tried.
And I still have the letters, of course.
Sometimes I will take a few years' worth
to reread in the garden,
with a glass of iced tea.
And I feel, sometimes, part of something
very great, wholly profound and sweeping.
I loved once, I loved twice,
easily three times I loved.
ISLAND
The curtains parted. Light
coming in. Moonlight, then sunlight.
Not changing because time was passing
but because the one moment had many aspects.
White lisianthus in a chipped vase.
Sound of the wind. Sound
of lapping water. And hours passing, the white sails
luminous, the boat rocking at anchor.
Motion not yet channeled in time.
The curtains shifting or stirring; the moment
shimmering, a hand moving
backward, then forward. Silence. And then
one word, a name. And then another word:
again, again.
And time
salvaged, like a pulse between
stillness and change. Late afternoon. The soon to be lost
becoming memory; the mind closing around it. The room
claimed again, as a possession. Sunlight,
then moonlight. The eyes glazed over with tears.
And then the moon fading, the white sails flexing.
THE DESTINATION
We had only a few days, but they were very long,
the light changed constantly.
A few days, spread out over several years,
over the course of a decade.
And each meeting charged with a sense of exactness,
as though we had traveled, separately,
some great distance; as though there had been,
through all the years of wandering,
a destination, after all.
Not a place, but a body, a voice.
A few days. Intensity
that was never permitted to develop
into tolerance or sluggish affection.
And I believed for many years this was a great marvel;
in my mind, I returned to those days repeatedly,
convinced they were the center of my amorous life.
The days were very long, like the days now.
And the intervals, the separations, exalted,
suffused with a kind of passionate joy that seemed, somehow,
to extend those days, to be inseparable from them.
So that a few hours could take up a lifetime.
A few hours, a world that neither unfolded nor diminished,
that could, at any point, be entered againâ
So that long after the end I could return to it without difficulty,
I could live almost completely in imagination.
THE BALCONY
It was a night like this, at the end of summer.
We had rented, I remember, a room with a balcony.
How many days and nights? Five, perhapsâno more.
Even when we weren't touching we were making love.
We stood on our little balcony in the summer night.
And off somewhere, the sounds of human life.
We were the soon to be anointed monarchs,
well disposed to our subjects. Just beneath us,
sounds of a radio playing, an aria we didn't in those years know.
Someone dying of love. Someone from whom time had taken
the only happiness, who was alone now,
impoverished, without beauty.
The rapturous notes of an unendurable grief, of isolation and terror,
the nearly impossible to sustain slow phrases of the ascending figuresâ
they drifted out over the dark water
like an ecstasy.
Such a small mistake. And many years later,
the only thing left of that night, of the hours in that room.
COPPER BEECH
Why is the earth angry at heaven?
If there's a question, is there an answer?
On Dana Street, a copper beech.
Immense, like the tree of my childhood,
but with a violence I wasn't ready to see then.
I was a child like a pointed finger,
then an explosion of darkness;
my mother could do nothing with me.
Interesting, isn't it,
the language she used.
The copper beech rearing like an animal.
Frustration, rage, the terrible wounded pride
of rebuffed loveâI remember
rising from the earth to heaven. I remember
I had two parents,
one harsh, one invisible. Poor
clouded father, who worked
only in gold and silver.
STUDY OF MY SISTER
We respect, here in America,
what is concrete, visible. We ask
What is it for? What does it lead to?
My sister
put her fork down. She felt, she said,
as though she should jump off a cliff.
A crime has been committed
against a human soul
as against the small child
who spends all day entertaining herself
with the colored blocks
so that she looks up
radiant at the end,
presenting herself,
giving herself back to her parents
and they say
What did you build?
and then, because she seems
so blank, so confused,
they repeat the question.
AUGUST
My sister painted her nails fuchsia,
a color named after a fruit.
All the colors were named after foods:
coffee frost, tangerine sherbet.
We sat in the backyard, waiting for our lives to resume
the ascent summer interrupted:
triumphs, victories, for which school
was a kind of practice.
The teachers smiled down at us, pinning on the blue ribbons.
And in our heads, we smiled down at the teachers.
Our lives were stored in our heads.
They hadn't begun; we were both sure
we'd know when they did.
They certainly weren't this.
We sat in the backyard, watching our bodies change:
first bright pink, then tan.
I dribbled baby oil on my legs; my sister
rubbed polish remover on her left hand,
tried another color.
We read, we listened to the portable radio.
Obviously this wasn't life, this sitting around
in colored lawn chairs.
Nothing matched up to the dreams.
My sister kept trying to find a color she liked:
it was summer, they were all frosted.
Fuchsia, orange, mother-of-pearl.
She held her left hand in front of her eyes,
moved it from side to side.
Why was it always like thisâ
the colors so intense in the glass bottles,
so distinct, and on the hand
almost exactly alike,
a film of weak silver.
My sister shook the bottle. The orange
kept sinking to the bottom; maybe
that was the problem.
She shook it over and over, held it up to the light,
studied the words in the magazine.
The world was a detail, a small thing not yet
exactly right. Or like an afterthought, somehow
still crude or approximate.
What was real was the idea:
My sister added a coat, held her thumb
to the side of the bottle.
We kept thinking we would see
the gap narrow, though in fact it persisted.
The more stubbornly it persisted,
the more fiercely we believed.
SUMMER AT THE BEACH
Before we started camp, we went to the beach.
Long days, before the sun was dangerous.
My sister lay on her stomach, reading mysteries.
I sat in the sand, watching the water.
You could use the sand to cover
parts of your body that you didn't like.
I covered my feet, to make my legs longer;
the sand climbed over my ankles.
I looked down at my body, away from the water.
I was what the magazines told me to be:
coltish. I was a frozen colt.
My sister didn't bother with these adjustments.
When I told her to cover her feet, she tried a few times,
but she got bored; she didn't have enough willpower
to sustain a deception.
I watched the sea; I listened to the other families.
Babies everywhere: what went on in their heads?
I couldn't imagine myself as a baby;
I couldn't picture myself not thinking.
I couldn't imagine myself as an adult either.
They all had terrible bodies: lax, oily, completely
committed to being male and female.
The days were all the same.
When it rained, we stayed home.
When the sun shone, we went to the beach with my mother.
My sister lay on her stomach, reading her mysteries.
I sat with my legs arranged to resemble
what I saw in my head, what I believed was my true self.