Poems 1962-2012 (Los Angeles Times Book Award: Poetry)

by Louise Glück

Above the dead valves pines pared Down by a storm stood, limbs bared … I want you.

He’s bored— I see it. Don’t I lick his bribes, set his bouquets In water? Over Mother’s lace I watch him drive into the gored Roasts, deal slivers in his mercy … I can feel his thighs Against me for the children’s sakes.

I have survived my life. The yellow daylight lines the oak leaf And the wire vines melt with the unchanged changes Of the baby.

I thought I was past The memory. And yet his ghost Took shape in smoke above the pan roast. Five years. In tenebris the catapulted heart drones Like Andromeda. No one telephones.

SECONDS

I saw Venus among those clamshells, raw Botticelli: I have known no happiness so based in truth.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

They do not tell You but bones turned coral still smell Amid forsaken treasure. I have been past What you hear in a shell.

My chore Was marking time. Gluing Relics into books I saw Myself at seven learning Distance at my mother’s knee.

Wait it out, Paralysis, or peace, Whichever,

So much pain in the world—the formless grief of the body, whose language is hunger—

And in the hall, the boxed roses: what they mean is chaos. Then begins the terrible charity of marriage, husband and wife climbing the green hill in gold light until there is no hill, only a flat plain stopped by the sky. Here is my hand, he said. But that was long ago. Here is my hand that will not harm you.

What was it like to be led? I trusted no one. My name was like a stranger’s, read from an envelope. But nothing was taken from me that I could have used. For once, I admit that.

It begins quietly in certain female children: the fear of death, taking as its form dedication to hunger, because a woman’s body is a grave; it will accept anything.

She is past being taken in by kindness, preferring wet streets: what death claims it does not abandon.

And for one instant I believed I was entering the stable dark of the earth and thought it would hold me.

Now, after so much solitude,

death doesn’t frighten me, not yours, not mine either. And those words, the last time, have no power over me. I know intense love always leads to mourning.

He himself preferred to listen in the small apartments as a man would check his camera at the museum, to express his commitment through silence: there is no other exile. The rest is egotism; in the bloody street, the I, the impostor— He was there, obsessed with revolution, in his own city, daily climbing the wooden stairs that were not a path but necessary repetitions and for twenty years making no poetry of what he saw: nor did he forfeit great achievement. In his mind, there could be no outcry that did not equate

his choice with their imprisonment and he would not allow the gift to be tainted.

Winters are long here. The road a dark gray, the maples gray, silvered with lichen, and the sun low on the horizon, white on blue; at sunset, vivid orange-red. When I shut my eyes, it vanishes. When I open my eyes, it reappears. Outside, spring rain, a pulse, a film on the window. And suddenly it is summer, all puzzling fruit and light.

Beauty dies: that is the source of creation.

But nakedness in women is always a pose. I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

Look up into the light of the lantern. Don’t you see? The calm of darkness is the horror of Heaven. We’ve been apart too long, too painfully separated. How can you bear to dream, to give up watching? I think you must be dreaming, your face is full of mild expectancy. I need to wake you, to remind you that there isn’t a future. That’s why we’re free. And now some weakness in me has been cured forever, so I’m not compelled to close my eyes, to go back, to rectify—

I have to tell you what I’ve learned, that I know now what happens to the dreamers. They don’t feel it when they change. One day they wake, they dress, they are old.

Then what began as love for you became a hunger for structure: I could hear the woman call to me in common kindness, knowing I wouldn’t ask for you anymore— So it was settled: I could have a childhood there. Which came to mean being always alone.

Sooner or later you will call my name, cry of loss, mistaken cry of recognition, of arrested need for someone who exists in memory: no voice carries to that kingdom.

What happens afterward occurs far from the world, at a depth where only the dream matters and the bond with any one soul is meaningless; you throw it away.

All my life I have worshiped the wrong gods.

The context of truth is darkness: it sweeps the deserts of Israel. Are you taken in by lights, by illusions? Here is your path to god, who has no name, whose hand is invisible: a trick of moonlight on the dark water.

But you will not grow, you will not let yourself obliterate anything.

“From this moment I will never know ease,” you said, “since you have lied to me, nor joy.”

Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love.

Though the great soul is said to be a star, a beacon, what it resembles better is a diamond: in the whole world there is nothing hard enough to change it.

Long ago, I was wounded. I learned to exist, in reaction, out of touch with the world: I’ll tell you what I meant to be— a device that listened. Not inert: still. A piece of wood. A stone. Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing? Those people breathing in the other beds could hardly follow, being uncontrollable like any dream— Through the blinds, I watched the moon in the night sky, shrinking and swelling—

I was born to a vocation: to bear witness to the great mysteries. Now that I’ve seen both birth and death, I know to the dark nature these are proofs, not

myste...

Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game my grandmother taught all her daughters.

My aunt doesn’t give an inch, doesn’t make allowance for my mother’s weariness. It’s how they were raised: you show respect by fighting. To let up insults the opponent.

CONFESSION

My mother’s seen death; she doesn’t talk about the soul’s integrity.

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. I don’t see anything objectively.

It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight. In the end, they’re wasted—

In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous. People like me, who seem selfless, we’re the cripples, the liars; we’re the ones who should be factored out in the interest of truth.

When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges. A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers. Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas red and bright pink. If you want the truth, you have to close yourself to the older daughter, block her out: when a living thing is hurt like that, in its deepest workings, all function is altered. That’s why I’m not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind.

I must learn to forgive my mother, now that I’m helpless to spare my son.

It’s not a bad life. Of course, she has those gifts, time and intelligence.

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was— for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs. You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice:

from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.