Authors: Louise Glück
Because it
was
true: when I didn't move I was perfect.
RAIN IN SUMMER
We were supposed to be, all of us,
a circle, a line at every point
equally weighted or tensed, equally
close to the center. I saw it
differently. In my mind, my parents
were the circle; my sister and I
were trapped inside.
Long Island. Terrible
storms off the Atlantic, summer rain
hitting the gray shingles. I watched
the copper beech, the dark leaves turning
a sort of lacquered ebony. It seemed to be
secure, as secure as the house.
It made sense to be housebound.
We were anyway: we couldn't change who we were.
We couldn't change even the smallest facts:
our long hair parted in the center,
secured with two barrettes. We embodied
those ideas of my mother's
not appropriate to adult life.
Ideas of childhood: how to look, how to act.
Ideas of spirit: what gifts to claim, to develop.
Ideas of character: how to be driven, how to prevail,
how to triumph in the true manner of greatness
without seeming to lift a finger.
It was all going on much too long:
childhood, summer. But we were safe;
we lived in a closed form.
Piano lessons. Poems, drawings. Summer rain
hammering at the circle. And the mind
developing within fixed conditions
a few tragic assumptions: we felt safe,
meaning we saw the world as dangerous.
We would prevail or conquer, meaning
we saw homage as love.
My sister and I stared out
into the violence of the summer rain.
It was obvious to us two people couldn't
prevail at the same time. My sister
took my hand, reaching across the flowered cushions.
Neither of us could see, yet,
the cost of any of this.
But she was frightened, she trusted me.
CIVILIZATION
It came to us very late:
perception of beauty, desire for knowledge.
And in the great minds, the two often configured as one.
To perceive, to speak, even on subjects inherently cruelâ
to speak boldly even when the facts were, in themselves, painful or direâ
seemed to introduce among us some new action,
having to do with human obsession, human passion.
And yet something, in this action, was being conceded.
And this offended what remained in us of the animal:
it was enslavement speaking, assigning
power to forces outside ourselves.
Therefore the ones who spoke were exiled and silenced,
scorned in the streets.
But the facts persisted. They were among us,
isolated and without pattern; they were among us,
shaping usâ
Darkness. Here and there a few fires in doorways,
wind whipping around the corners of buildingsâ
Where were the silenced, who conceived these images?
In the dim light, finally summoned, resurrected.
As the scorned were praised, who had brought
these truths to our attention, who had felt their presence,
who had perceived them clearly in their blackness and horror
and had arranged them to communicate
some vision of their substance, their magnitudeâ
In which the facts themselves were suddenly
serene, glorious. They were among us,
not singly, as in chaos, but woven
into relationship or set in order, as though life on earth
could, in this one form, be apprehended deeply
though it could never be mastered.
DECADE
What joy touches
the solace of ritual? A void
appears in the life.
A shock so deep, so terrible,
its force
levels the perceived world. You were
a beast at the edge of its cave, only
waking and sleeping. Then
the minute shift; the eye
taken by something.
Spring: the unforeseen
flooding the abyss.
And the life
filling again. And finally
a place
found for everything.
THE EMPTY GLASS
I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.
And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.
A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.
O wrong, wrongâit was my nature. I was
hard-hearted, remote. I was
selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.
But I was always that person, even in early childhood.
Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.
I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract
tide of fortune turned
from high to low overnight.
Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,
to celestial force? To be safe,
I prayed. I tried to be a better person.
Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror
and matured into moral narcissism
might have become in fact
actual human growth. Maybe
this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,
telling me they understood
the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,
implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick
to give so much for so little.
Whereas they meant I was
good
(clasping my hand intensely)â
a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.
I was not pathetic! I was writ large,
like a great queen or saint.
Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.
And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply
trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse
to persuade or seduceâ
What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fateâ
What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?
And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.
QUINCE TREE
We had, in the end, only the weather for a subject.
Luckily, we lived in a world with seasonsâ
we felt, still, access to variety:
darkness, euphoria, various kinds of waiting.
I suppose, in the true sense, our exchanges
couldn't be called conversation, being
dominated by accord, by repetition.
And yet it would be wrong to imagine
we had neither sense of one another nor
deep response to the world, as it would be wrong to believe
our lives were narrow, or empty.
We had great wealth.
We had, in fact, everything we could see
and while it is true we could see
neither great distance nor fine detail,
what we were able to discern we grasped
with a hunger the young can barely conceive,
as though all experience had been channeled into
these few perceptions.
Channeled without memory.
Because the past was lost to us as referent,
lost as image, as narrative. What had it contained?
Was there love? Had there been, once,
sustained labor? Or fame, had there ever been
something like that?
In the end, we didn't need to ask. Because
we felt the past; it was, somehow,
in these things, the front lawn and back lawn,
suffusing them, giving the little quince tree
a weight and meaning almost beyond enduring.
Utterly lost and yet strangely alive, the whole of our human existenceâ
it would be wrong to think
because we never left the yard
that what we felt there was somehow shrunken or partial.
In its grandeur and splendor, the world
was finally present.
And it was always this we discussed or alluded to
when we were moved to speak.
The weather. The quince tree.
You, in your innocence, what do you know of this world?
THE TRAVELER
At the top of the tree was what I wanted.
Fortunately I had read books:
I knew I was being tested.
I knew nothing would workâ
not to climb that high, not to force
the fruit down. One of three results must follow:
the fruit isn't what you imagined,
or it is but fails to satiate.
Or it is damaged in falling
and as a shattered thing torments you forever.
But I refused to be
bested by fruit. I stood under the tree,
waiting for my mind to save me.
I stood, long after the fruit rotted.
And after many years, a traveler passed by me
where I stood, and greeted me warmly,
as one would greet a brother. And I asked why,
why was I so familiar to him,
having never seen him?
And he said, “Because I am like you,
therefore I recognize you. I treated all experience
as a spiritual or intellectual trial
in which to exhibit or prove my superiority
to my predecessors. I chose
to live in hypothesis; longing sustained me.
In fact, what I needed most was longing, which you seem
to have achieved in stasis,
but which I have found in change, in departure.”
ARBORETUM
We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger.
Not needing, anymore, even to make a contribution.
Merely wishing to linger: to be, to be here.
And to stare at things, but with no real avidity.
To browse, to purchase nothing.
But there were many of us; we took up time. We crowded out
our own children, and the children of friends. We did great damage,
meaning no harm.
We continued to plan; to fix things as they broke.
To repair, to improve. We traveled, we put in gardens.
And we continued brazenly to plant trees and perennials.
We asked so little of the world. We understood
the offense of advice, of holding forth. We checked ourselves:
we were correct, we were silent.
But we could not cure ourselves of desire, not completely.
Our hands, folded, reeked of it.
How did we do so much damage, merely sitting and watching,
strolling, on fine days, the grounds of the park, the arboretum,
or sitting on benches in front of the public library,
feeding pigeons out of a paper bag?
We were correct, and yet desire pursued us.
Like a great force, a god. And the young
were offended; their hearts
turned cold in reaction. We asked
so little of the world; small things seemed to us
immense wealth. Merely to smell once more the early roses
in the arboretum: we asked
so little, and we claimed nothing. And the young
withered nevertheless.
Or they became like stones in the arboretum: as though
our continued existence, our asking so little for so many years, meant
we asked everything.
DREAM OF LUST
After one of those nights, a day:
the mind dutiful, waking, putting on its slippers,
and the spirit restive, muttering
I'd rather, I'd ratherâ
Where did it come from,
so sudden, so fierce,
an unexpected animal? Who
was the mysterious figure?
You are ridiculously young, I told him.
The day tranquil, beautiful, expecting attention.
The night distracting and barredâ
and I cannot return,
not even for information.
Roses in bloom, penstemon, the squirrels
preoccupied for the moment.
And suddenly I don't live here, I live in a mystery.
He had an odd lumbering gaucheness
that became erotic grace.
It is what I thought and not what I thought:
the world is not my world, the human body
makes an impasse, an obstacle.
Clumsy, in jeans, then suddenly
doing the most amazing things
as though they were entirely his ideaâ
But the afterward at the end of the timeless:
coffee, dark bread, the sustaining rituals
going on now so far awayâ
the human body a compulsion, a magnet,
the dream itself obstinately
clinging, the spirit
helpless to let it goâ
it is still not worth
losing the world.
GRACE
We were taught, in those years,
never to speak of good fortune.
To not speak, to not feelâ
it was the smallest step for a child
of any imagination.
And yet an exception was made
for the language of faith;
we were trained in the rudiments of this language
as a precaution.
Not to speak swaggeringly in the world
but to speak in homage, abjectly, privatelyâ
And if one lacked faith?
If one believed, even in childhood, only in chanceâ
such powerful words they used, our teachers!
Disgrace, punishment: many of us
preferred to remain mute, even in the presence of the divine.
Ours were the voices raised in lament
against the cruel vicissitudes.
Ours were the dark libraries, the treatises
on affliction. In the dark, we recognized one another;