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

by Louise Glück

Midsummer— everything is possible. Meaning: never again will life end.

live essentially in darkness. You are perhaps training me to be responsive to the slightest brightening. Or, like the poets, are you stimulated by despair, does grief move you to reveal your nature?

How lush the world is, how full of things that don’t belong to me

You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love silence and darkness.

Hush, beloved. It doesn’t matter to me how many summers I live to return: this one summer we have entered eternity.

What can I tell you that you don’t know that will make you tremble again?

But is waiting forever always the answer? Nothing is always the answer; the answer depends on the story.

The night isn’t dark; the world is dark. Stay with me a little longer.

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

I think now if I felt less I would be a better person.

So it is true after all, not merely a rule of art: change your form and you change your nature. And time does this to us.

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

I refuse you sleep again if I cannot have you.

My thoughts are deep and my memory long; why would I envy such freedom when I have humanity?

This is the end, isn’t it? And you are here with me again, listening with me: the sea no longer torments me; the self I wished to be is the self I am.

I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem.

so much to celebrate tonight, as though she were saying here is the world, that should be enough to make you happy.

laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, something like that.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

I begin now to perceive the nature of my soul, the soul I inhabit as punishment. Inflexible, even in hunger.

human beings know what they need, better than any god.

So that for the first time I find myself able to look ahead, able to look at the world, even to move toward it.

I dreamed this, does that mean it didn’t happen? Does it have to happen in the world to be real?

Are you healed or do you only think you’re healed? I told myself from nothing nothing could be taken away. But can you love anyone yet? When I feel safe, I can love. But will you touch anyone? I told myself if I had nothing the world couldn’t touch me.

I was never safe, even when I was most hidden. Even then I was waiting.

This whole poem >

Bedtime, they whisper. Time to begin lying.

This spoke to me because the scenarios that i come up with at bedtime consist of me just straight up lying and trickin myself into believing shit that will never happen. Just girly things

I think sometimes too much is asked of us; I think sometimes our consolations are the costliest thing.

I had nothing to build with. It was winter: I couldn’t imagine anything but the past.

Then it was spring and I was inexplicably happy.

First I was at peace. Then I was contented, satisfied. And then flashes of joy. And the season changed—for all of us, of course.

Why should I lie: that life is over now. Why shouldn’t I use what I know? You changed me, you should remember me.

Once is enough: why is he living again? And so briefly, and only in dream.

I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way and like everyone I called that accomplishment

I caution you as I was never cautioned: you will never let go, you will never be satiated. You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.

What follows the light is what precedes it: the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.

Why is this Reylo coded

Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness of winter. It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history. It takes genius to forget these things.

Do you dare send me away as though you were waiting for something better?

And then fall was gone, the year was gone. We were changing, we were growing up. But it wasn’t something you decided to do; it was something that happened, something you couldn’t control. Time was passing. Time was carrying us faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory, and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness.

And there were so many things I never got to tell you about myself, things which might have swayed you. And the photo I never sent, taken the night I looked almost splendid. I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow kept hitting the mirror and coming back.

And I feel, sometimes, part of something very great, wholly profound and sweeping.

Because it was true: when I didn’t move I was perfect.

Utterly lost and yet strangely alive, the whole of our human existence—

You, in your innocence, what do you know of this world?

Urgency, there was so much urgency— to change, to escape the past. It was cold, it was winter: I was frightened for my life— Then it was spring, the earth turning a surprising blue.

And summer lasted. It lasted because we were happy.

And the insecurity of great hope suddenly gone. And the heart still alert.

I was in a kind of dream or trance— in love, and yet I wanted nothing.

I gave you your chance. I listened to you, I believed in you. I will not let you have me again.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

Summer after summer has ended, balm after violence: it does me no good to be good to me now; violence has changed me.