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

by Louise Glück

death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.

How privileged you are, to be still passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

you are not alone, the poem said, in the dark tunnel.

my friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

I remember peace of a kind I never knew again.

I lived in the present, which was that part of the future you could see. The past floated above my head, like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable.

I want it to be my fault she said so I can fix it—

You may not do a good job of it, but you go on— something you have no choice about.

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

Once the earth decides to have no memory time seems in a way meaningless.

There are places like this everywhere, places you enter as a young girl, from which you never return.

But for me—I think the guilt I feel must mean I haven’t lived very well.

she remembers everything and admits nothing.

There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.

They’re alone at the fountain, in a dark well. They’ve been exiled by the world of hope, which is the world of action, but the world of thought hasn’t as yet opened to them. When it does, everything will change.

It’s the best part of the summer, when it’s still beginning— the sun’s shining, but the heat isn’t intense yet. And freedom hasn’t gotten boring.

But your body doesn’t listen. It knows everything now, it says you’re not a child, you haven’t been a child for a long time.

Everything still smells of summer. And her body begins to seem again the body she had as a young woman, glistening under the light summer clothing.