Faithful and Virtuous Night

by Louise Glück

AN ADVENTURE

Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference?

Sometime after I had entered that time of life people prefer to allude to in others but not in themselves, in the middle of the night the phone rang. It rang and rang as though the world needed me, though really it was the reverse. I lay in bed, trying to analyze the ring. It had my mother’s persistence and my father’s pained embarrassment. When I picked it up, the line was dead. Or was the phone working and the caller dead? Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps?

I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.

You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confront much sorrow and disappointment. He gazed at me with increasing frankness.

I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.

Day alternated with night, the earth and sky taking turns being illuminated.

Chaos was what I saw.

And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted solitude Kant perhaps experienced on his way to the bridges—

Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks. And the sun says yes. And the desert answers your voice is sand scattered in wind.

I was on my balcony. In my right hand I held a glass of Scotch in which two ice cubes were melting. Silence had entered me. It was like the night, and my memories—they were like stars in that they were fixed, though of course if one could see as do the astronomers

one would see they are unending fires, like the fires of hell. I set my glass on the iron railing.

All this time I had the giddy sensation of floating above my life. Far away that life occurred. But was it still occurring: that was the question.

Perhaps the drugs were working? At some point, the streetlights came on.

And yet his complacency disguised suffering as perhaps my suffering disguised complacency.

It is the critics, he said, the critics have the ideas. We artists (he included me)—we artists are just children at our games.