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

by Louise Glück

And you never say Leave me since the dead do not like being alone.

Here is my hand, he said. But that was long ago. Here is my hand that will not harm you.

envy is a dance, too; the need to hurt binds you to your partner.

From behind, a lens opens for your body. Why should you turn? It doesn’t matter who the witness is, for whom you are suffering, for whom you are standing still.

what death claims it does not abandon.

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.

Beauty dies: that is the source of creation.

I need to wake you, to remind you that there isn’t a future. That’s why we’re free.

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.

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

I’ll tell you something: every day people are dying. And that’s just the beginning. Every day, in funeral homes, new widows are born, new orphans.

But for my sister, that’s the condition of love. She was my father’s daughter: the face of love, to her, is the face turning away.

Anyone can love a dead child, love an absence.

In couples like this, where the agreement is to do things together, it’s always the active one who concedes, who gives. You can’t go to museums with someone who won’t open his eyes.

You should only hurt something you can give your whole heart to.

It’s not that my son’s inept, that he doesn’t do things well. I’ve watched him race: he’s natural, effortless— right from the first, he takes the lead. And then he stops. It’s as though he was born rejecting the solitude of the victor.

We merely knew it wasn’t human nature to love only what returns love.

I was not a child; I could take advantage of illusions.

Who else would so envy the bond we had then as to tell us it was not earth but heaven we were losing?

If what you fear in death is punishment beyond this, you need not fear death: how many times must I destroy my own creation to teach you this is your punishment: with one gesture I established you in time and in paradise.

from this point on, the silence through which you move is my voice pursuing you.

How can I know you love me unless I see you grieve over me?

they don’t know that when one loves this way the shroud becomes a wedding dress.

You know why they’re happy? They take the children. And you know why they can go on walks with children? Because they have children.

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

She weeps for her past; when one has a secret life, one’s tears are never explained.

I kept thinking of how we used to watch television, how I would put my feet in your lap. The cat would sit on top of them. Doesn’t that still seem an image of contentment, of well-being? So why couldn’t it go on longer? Because it was a dream.

The master said You must write what you see. But what I see does not move me. The master answered Change what you see.

“… No sadness is greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy…”

I thought we were not responsible any more than we were responsible for being alive.

less the wish to be remembered than the wish to survive, which is, I believe, the deepest human wish.

I hate when your own dreams treat you as stupid.

Just because the past is longer than the future doesn’t mean there is no future.

We sat in the backyard, waiting for our lives to resume

It grieves me to think the dead won’t see them— these things we depend on, they disappear. What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won’t need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine.

From within the earth’s bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness my friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

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 have been lost before, I have been cold before. The night has come to me exactly this way, as a premonition— And I thought: if I am asked to return here, I would like to come back as a human being, and my horse to remain himself. Otherwise I would not know how to begin again.

He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you’re dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.

It is terrible to be alone. I don’t mean to live alone— to be alone, where no one hears you.

Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness— abstractions from which come intense pleasures, like the figs on the table.

To my mind, you’re better off if you stay; that way, dreams don’t damage you.

To get born, your body makes a pact with death, and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat

But there are truths that ruin a life; the same way, some lies are generous, warm and cozy like the sun on the brick wall.

But man knows nothing of death. If how we behave is how you feel, this is not what death is like, this is what life is like.

The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting. And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages: You will leave the village where you were born and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful, but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you can’t say what it was, and eventually you will return to seek it.