Authors: Louise Glück
The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.
You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us
that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.
White of forgetfulness,
white of safetyâ
They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth
asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestionâ
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read
as an argument between the mother and the loverâ
the daughter is just meat.
When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother's
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.
Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal lifeâ
My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earthâ
What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?
PRISM
1.
Who can say what the world is? The world
is in flux, therefore
unreadable, the winds shifting,
the great plates invisibly shifting and changingâ
2.
Dirt. Fragments
of blistered rock. On which
the exposed heart constructs
a house, memory: the gardens
manageable, small in scale, the beds
damp at the sea's edgeâ
3.
As one takes in
an enemy, through these windows
one takes in
the world:
here is the kitchen, here the darkened study.
Meaning: I am master here.
4.
When you fall in love, my sister said,
it's like being struck by lightning.
She was speaking hopefully,
to draw the attention of the lightning.
I reminded her that she was repeating exactly
our mother's formula, which she and I
had discussed in childhood, because we both felt
that what we were looking at in the adults
were the effects not of lightning
but of the electric chair.
5.
Riddle:
Why was my mother happy?
Answer:
She married my father.
6.
“You girls,” my mother said, “should marry
someone like your father.”
That was one remark. Another was,
“There is no one like your father.”
7.
From the pierced clouds, steady lines of silver.
Unlikely
yellow of the witch hazel, veins
of mercury that were the paths of the riversâ
Then the rain again, erasing
footprints in the damp earth.
An implied path, like
a map without a crossroads.
8.
The implication was, it was necessary to abandon
childhood. The word “marry” was a signal.
You could also treat it as aesthetic advice;
the voice of the child was tiresome,
it had no lower register.
The word was a code, mysterious, like the Rosetta stone.
It was also a roadsign, a warning.
You could take a few things with you like a dowry.
You could take the part of you that thought.
“Marry” meant you should keep that part quiet.
9.
A night in summer. Outside,
sounds of a summer storm. Then the sky clearing.
In the window, constellations of summer.
I'm in a bed. This man and I,
we are suspended in the strange calm
sex often induces. Most sex induces.
Longing, what is that? Desire, what is that?
In the window, constellations of summer.
Once, I could name them.
10.
Abstracted
shapes, patterns.
The light of the mind. The cold, exacting
fires of disinterestedness, curiously
blocked by earth, coherent, glittering
in air and water,
the elaborate
signs that said
now plant, now harvestâ
I could name them, I had names for them:
two different things.
11.
Fabulous things, stars.
When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia.
Summer nights, my parents permitted me to sit by the lake;
I took the dog for company.
Did I say “suffered”? That was my parents' way of explaining
tastes that seemed to them
inexplicable: better “suffered” than “preferred to live with the dog.”
Darkness. Silence that annulled mortality.
The tethered boats rising and falling.
When the moon was full, I could sometimes read the girls' names
painted to the sides of the boats:
Ruth Ann, Sweet Izzy, Peggy My Darlingâ
They were going nowhere, those girls.
There was nothing to be learned from them.
I spread my jacket in the damp sand,
the dog curled up beside me.
My parents couldn't see the life in my head;
when I wrote it down, they fixed the spelling.
Sounds of the lake. The soothing, inhuman
sounds of water lapping the dock, the dog scuffling somewhere
in the weedsâ
12.
The assignment was to fall in love.
The details were up to you.
The second part was
to include in the poem certain words,
words drawn from a specific text
on another subject altogether.
13.
Spring rain, then a night in summer.
A man's voice, then a woman's voice.
You grew up, you were struck by lightning.
When you opened your eyes, you were wired forever to your true love.
It only happened once. Then you were taken care of,
your story was finished.
It happened once. Being struck was like being vaccinated;
the rest of your life you were immune,
you were warm and dry.
Unless the shock wasn't deep enough.
Then you weren't vaccinated, you were addicted.
14.
The assignment was to fall in love.
The author was female.
The ego had to be called the soul.
The action took place in the body.
Stars represented everything else: dreams, the mind, etc.
The beloved was identified
with the self in a narcissistic projection.
The mind was a subplot. It went nattering on.
Time was experienced
less as narrative than ritual.
What was repeated had weight.
Certain endings were tragic, thus acceptable.
Everything else was failure.
15.
Deceit. Lies. Embellishments we call
hypothesesâ
There were too many roads, too many versions.
There were too many roads, no one pathâ
And at the end?
16.
List the implications of “crossroads.”
Answer: a story that will have a moral.
Give a counter-example:
17.
The self ended and the world began.
They were of equal size,
commensurate,
one mirrored the other.
18.
The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind.
The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.
19.
The room was quiet.
That is, the room was quiet, but the lovers were breathing.
In the same way, the night was dark.
It was dark, but the stars shone.
The man in bed was one of several men
to whom I gave my heart. The gift of the self,
that is without limit.
Without limit, though it recurs.
The room was quiet. It was an absolute,
like the black night.
20.
A night in summer. Sounds of a summer storm.
The great plates invisibly shifting and changingâ
And in the dark room, the lovers sleeping in each other's arms.
We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,
who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,
the stranger.
CRATER LAKE
There was a war between good and evil.
We decided to call the body good.
That made death evil.
It turned the soul
against death completely.
Like a foot soldier wanting
to serve a great warrior, the soul
wanted to side with the body.
It turned against the dark,
against the forms of death
it recognized.
Where does the voice come from
that says suppose the war
is evil, that says
suppose the body did this to us,
made us afraid of loveâ
ECHOES
1.
Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.
My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know.
2.
When I was still very young
my parents moved to a small valley
surrounded by mountains
in what was called the lake country.
From our kitchen garden
you could see the mountains,
snow covered, even in summer.
I remember peace of a kind
I never knew again.
Somewhat later, I took it upon myself
to become an artist,
to give voice to these impressions.
3.
The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.
This silence is my companion now.
I ask:
of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers
if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?
FUGUE
1.
I was the man because I was taller.
My sister decided
when we should eat.
From time to time, she'd have a baby.
2.
Then my soul appeared.
Who are you, I said.
And my soul said,
I am your soul, the winsome stranger.
3.
Our dead sister
waited, undiscovered in my mother's head.
Our dead sister was neither
a man nor a woman. She was like a soul.
4.
My soul was taken in:
it attached itself to a man.
Not a real man, the man
I pretended to be, playing with my sister.
5.
It is coming back to meâlying on the couch
has refreshed my memory.
My memory is like a basement filled with old papers:
nothing ever changes.
6.
I had a dream: my mother fell out of a tree.
After she fell, the tree died:
it had outlived its function.
My mother was unharmedâher arrows disappeared, her wings
turned into arms. Fire creature: Sagittarius. She finds herself inâ
a suburban garden. It is coming back to me.
7.
I put the book aside. What is a soul?
A flag flown
too high on the pole, if you know what I mean.
The body
cowers in the dreamlike underbrush.
8.
Well, we are here to do something about that.
(In a German accent.)
9.
I had a dream: we are at war.
My mother leaves her crossbow in the high grass.
(Sagittarius, the archer.)
My childhood, closed to me forever,
turned gold like an autumn garden,
mulched with a thick layer of salt marsh hay.
10.
A golden bow: a useful gift in wartime.
How heavy it wasâno child could pick it up.
Except me: I could pick it up.
11.
Then I was wounded. The bow
was now a harp, its string cutting
deep into my palm. In the dream
it both makes the wound and seals the wound.
12.
My childhood: closed to me. Or is it
under the mulchâfertile.
But very dark. Very hidden.
13.
In the dark, my soul said
I am your soul.
No one can see me; only youâ
only you can see me.
14.
And it said, you must trust me.
Meaning: if you move the harp,
you will bleed to death.
15.
Why can't I cry out?
I should be writing
my hand is bleeding,
feeling pain and terrorâwhat
I felt in the dream, as a casualty of war.
16.
It is coming back to me.
Pear tree. Apple tree.
I used to sit there
pulling arrows out of my heart.
17.
Then my soul appeared. It said
just as no one can see me, no one
can see the blood.
Also: no one can see the harp.
Then it said
I can save you. Meaning
this is a test.
18.
Who is “you”? As in
“Are you tired of invisible pain?”
19.
Like a small bird sealed off from daylight:
that was my childhood.
20.
I was the man because I was taller.
But I wasn't tallâ
didn't I ever look in a mirror?
21.
Silence in the nursery,
the consulting garden. Then:
What does the harp suggest?
22.
I know what you wantâ