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

by Louise Glück

It lives in me. You live in me. Malignant. Love, you ever want me, don’t.

I have survived my life.

have been primed for this, For separation, for so long.

I have not always lived like this, You know. And yet my sequined, consequential past Enables me to bear these shrieking nights And disasters.

June’s edge. The sun Turns kind. Birds wallow in the sob of pure air, Crated from the coast … Un- real. Unreal.

What do you think of, lying so quietly by the water? When you look that way I want to touch you, but do not, seeing as in another life we were of the same blood.

Why do I not forget?

And then spring came and withdrew from me the absolute knowledge of the unborn,

You have only to let it happen: that cry—release, release—like the moon wrenched out of earth and rising full in its circle of arrows

I am no longer young. What of it?

And now April raises up her plaque of flowers and the heart expands to admit its adversary.

Do not think I am not grateful for your small kindness to me. I like small kindnesses. In fact I actually prefer them to the more substantial kindness, that is always eyeing you, like a large animal on a rug, until your whole life reduces to nothing but waking up morning after morning cramped, and the bright sun shining on its tusks.

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.

No wonder you are the way you are, afraid of blood, your women like one brick wall after another.

in the dark you came to need, you would do it again

Had you died when we were together I would have wanted nothing of you. Now I think of you as dead, it is better.

Instruct me in the dark.

Look how the leaves drift in the darkness. We have burned away all that was written on them.

I wait to see how he will leave me.

restraint so passionate implies possession.

She can’t touch his arm in innocence again.

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

Wow

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.

Why should you turn? It doesn’t matter who the witness is, for whom you are suffering, for whom you are standing still.

In the beginning, longing. At the end, joy. In the middle, tedium.

What can shock me now? I feel no coldness that can’t be explained. Against your cheek, my hand is warm and full of tenderness.

And suddenly it is summer, all puzzling fruit and light.

There is no other immortality: in the cold spring, the purple violets open. And yet, the heart is black, there is its violence frankly exposed.

I ask you, how much beauty can a person bear? It is heavier than ugliness, even the burden of emptiness is nothing beside it.

you must have known, then, how I wanted you. We will always know that, you and I. The proof will be my body.

Sooner or later you’ll begin to dream of me. I don’t envy you those dreams. I can imagine how my face looks, burning like that, afflicted with desire—lowered face of your invention—how the mouth betrays the isolated greed of the lover as it magnifies and then destroys:

it was summer, it seemed everything had ripened at once.

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

At first, I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.

Never has she been further from sadness than she is now. She feels no call to weep, but neither does she know the meaning of that word, youth.

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.

But it’s her only hope, the wish to move backward. And just a little, not so far as the marriage, the first kiss.

The soul’s like all matter: why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form, when it could be free?

It never bothered me, not talking. That hasn’t changed much.

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. I don’t see anything objectively. I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that’s when I’m least to be trusted. 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.

That’s why I’m not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind.

I made an enemy of a flower: now, I’m ashamed.

The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

this, this, is the meaning of “a fortunate life”: it means to exist in the present.

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.

am not to speak to you in the personal way. Much has passed between us. Or was it always only on the one side?

I speak because I am shattered.

Dear friend, dear trembling partner, what surprises you most in what you feel, earth’s radiance or your own delight?