by Louise Glück
I passed through it like a plane passing through a cloud.
On the other side, the vacant sign still glowed above the lavatory.
My aunt died. My brother moved to America.
On my wrist, the watch face glistened in the false darkness
(the movie was being shown).
This was its special feature, a kind of bluish throbbing
which made the numbers easy to read, even in the absence of light.
Princely, I always thought.
And yet the serene transit of the hour hand
no longer represented my perception of time
which had become a sense of immobility
expressed as movement across vast distances.
The hand moved;
the twelve, as I watched, became the one again.
Whereas time was now this environment in which
I was contained with my fellow passengers,
as the infant is contained in his sturdy crib
or, to stretch the point, as the unborn child
wallows in his mother’s womb.
Outside the womb, the earth had fallen away;
I could see flares of lightning striking the wing.
When my funds were gone,
I went to live for a while
in a small house on my brother’s land
in the state of Montana.
I arrived in darkness;
at the airport, my bags were lost.
It seemed to me I had moved
not horizontally but rather from a very low place
to something very high,
perhaps still in the air.
Indeed, Montana was like the moon—
My brother drove confidently over the icy road,
from time to time stopping to point out
some rare formation.
We were, in the main, silent.
It came to me we had resumed
the arrangements of childhood,
our legs touching, the steering wheel
now substituting for the book.
And yet, in the deepest sense, they were interchangeable:
had not my brother always been steering,
both himself and me, out of our bleak bedroom
into a night of rocks and lakes
punctuated with swords sticking up here and there—
The sky was black. The earth was white and cold.
I watched the night fading. Above the white snow
the sun rose, turning the snow a strange pinkish color.
Then we arrived.
We stood awhile in the cold hall, waiting for the heat to start.
My brother wrote down my list of groceries.
Across my brother’s face,
waves of sadness alternated with waves of joy.
I thought, of course, of the house in Cornwall.
The cows, the monotonous summery music of the bells—
I felt, as you will guess, an instant of stark terror.
And then I was alone.
The next day, my bags arrived.
I unpacked my few belongings.
The photograph of my parents on their wedding day
to which was now added
a photograph of my aunt in her aborted youth, a souvenir
she had cherished and passed on to me.
Beyond these, only toiletries and medications,
together with my small collection of winter clothes.
My brother brought me books and journals.
He taught me various new world skills
for which I would soon have no use.
And yet this was to me the new world:
there was nothing, and nothing was supposed to happen.
The snow fell. Certain afternoons,
I gave drawing lessons to my brother’s wife.
At some point, I began to paint again.
It was impossible to form
any judgment of the work’s value.
Suffice to say the paintings were
immense and entirely white. The paint had been
applied thickly, in great irregular strokes—
Fields of white and glimpses, flashes
of blue, the blue of the western sky,
or what I called to myself
watch-face blue. It spoke to me of another world.
I have led my people, it said,
into the wilderness
where they will be purified.
My brother’s wife would stand mesmerized.
Sometimes my nephew came
(he would soon become my life companion).
I see, she would say, the face of a child.
She meant, I think, that feelings emanated from the surface,
feelings of helplessness or desolation—
Outside, the snow was falling.
I had been, I felt, accepted into its stillness.
And at the same time, each stroke was a decision,
not a conscious decision, but a decision nevertheless,
as when, for example, the murderer pulls the trigger.
This, he is saying. This is what I mean to do.
Or perhaps, what I need to do.
Or, this is all I can do.
Here, I believe, the analogy ends
in a welter of moral judgments.
Afterward, I expect, he remembers nothing.
In the same way, I cannot say exactly
how these paintings came into being, though in the end
there were many of them, difficult to ship home.
When I returned, Harry was with me.
He is, I believe, a gentle boy
with a taste for domesticity.
In fact, he has taught himself to cook
despite the pressures of his academic schedule.
We suit each other. Often he sings as he goes about his work.
So my mother sang (or, more likely, so my aunt reported).
I request, often, some particular song to which I am attached,
and he goes about learning it. He is, as I say,
an obliging boy. The hills are alive, he sings,
over and over. And sometimes, in my darker moods,
the Jacques Brel which has haunted me.
The little cat is dead, meaning, I suppose,
one’s last hope.
The cat is dead, Harry sings,
he will be pointless without his body.
In Harry’s voice, it is deeply soothing.
Sometimes his voice shakes, as with great emotion,
and then for a while the hills are alive overwhelms
the cat is dead.
But we do not, in the main, need to choose between them.
Still, the darker songs inspire him; each verse acquires variations.
The cat is dead: who will press, now,
his heart over my heart to warm me?
The end of hope, I think it means,
and yet in Harry’s voice it seems a great door is swinging open—
The snow-covered cat disappears in the high branches;
O what will I see when I follow?
THE HORSE AND RIDER
Once there was a horse, and on the horse there was a rider. How handsome they looked in the autumn sunlight, approaching a strange city! People thronged the streets or called from the high windows. Old women sat among flowerpots. But when you looked about for another horse or another rider, you looked in vain. My friend, said the animal, why not abandon me? Alone, you can find your way here. But to abandon you, said the other, would be to leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not know which part you are?
A WORK OF FICTION
As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light,
this small dot among the infinite stars? I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.
THE STORY OF A DAY
1.
I was awakened this morning as usual
by the narrow bars of light coming through the blinds
so that my first thought was that the nature of light
was incompleteness—
I pictured the light as it existed before the blinds stopped it—
how thwarted it must be, like a mind
dulled by too many drugs.
2.
I soon found myself
at my narrow table; to my right,
the remains of a small meal.
Language was filling my head, wild exhilaration
alternated with profound despair—
But if the essence of time is change,
how can anything become nothing?
This was the question I asked myself.
3.
Long into the night I sat brooding at my table
until my head was so heavy and empty
I was compelled to lie down.
But I did not lie down. Instead, I rested my head on my arms
which I had crossed in front of me on the bare wood.
Like a fledgling in a nest, my head
lay on my arms.
It was the dry season.
I heard the clock tolling, three, then four—
I began at this point to pace the room
and shortly afterward the streets outside
whose turns and windings were familiar to me
from nights like this. Around and around I walked,
instinctively imitating the hands of the clock.
My shoes, when I looked down, were covered with dust.
By now the moon and stars had faded.
But the clock was still glowing in the church tower—
4.
Thus I returned home.
I stood a long time
on the stoop where the stairs ended,
refusing to unlock the door.
The sun was rising.
The air had become heavy,
not because it had greater substance
but because there was nothing left to breathe.
I closed my eyes.
I was torn between a structure of oppositions
and a narrative structure—
5.
The room was as I left it.
There was the bed in the corner.
There was the table under the window.
There was the light battering itself against the window
until I raised the blinds
at which point it was redistributed
as flickering among the shade trees.
A SUMMER GARDEN
1.
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.
I wiped the dust from my mother’s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees, and shrubbery.
The sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and darkened.
The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew.
Summer arrived. The children
leaned over the rose border, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the roses.
A word came into my head, referring
to this shifting and changing, these erasures
that were now obvious—
it appeared, and as quickly vanished.
Was it blindness or darkness, peril, confusion?
Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna.
2.
When I had recovered somewhat from these events,
I replaced the photograph as I had found it
between the pages of an ancient paperback,
many parts of which had been
annotated in the margins, sometimes in words but more often
in spirited questions and exclamations
meaning “I agree” or “I’m unsure, puzzled”—
The ink was faded. Here and there I couldn’t tell
what thoughts occurred to the reader
but through the blotches I could sense
urgency, as though tears had fallen.
I held the book awhile.
It was Death in Venice (in translation);
I had noted the page in case, as Freud believed,
nothing is an accident.
Thus the little photograph
was buried again, as the past is buried in the future.
In the margin there were two words,
linked by an arrow: “sterility” and, down the page, “oblivion”—
“And it seemed to him the pale and lovely
Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned…”
3.
How quiet the garden is;
no breeze ruffles the Cornelian cherry.
Summer has come.
How quiet it is
now that life has triumphed. The rough
pillars of the sycamores
support the immobile
shelves of the foliage,
the lawn beneath
lush, iridescent—
And in the middle of the sky,
the immodest god.
Things are, he says. They are, they do not change;
response does not change.
How hushed it is, the stage
as well as the audience; it seems
breathing is an intrusion.
He must be very close,
the grass is shadowless.
How quiet it is, how silent,
like an afternoon in Pompeii.
4.
Mother died last night,
Mother who never dies.
Winter was in the air,
many months away
but in the air nevertheless.
It was the tenth of May.
Hyacinth and apple blossom
bloomed in the back garden.
We could hear
Maria singing songs from Czechoslovakia—
How alone I am—
songs of that kind.
How alone I am,
no mother, no father—
my brain seems so empty without them.
Aromas drifted out of the earth;
the dishes were in the sink,
rinsed but not stacked.
Under the full moon
Maria was folding the washing;
the stiff sheets became
dry white rectangles of moonlight.
How alone I am, but in music
my desolation is my rejoicing.
It was the tenth of May
as it had been the ninth, the eighth.
Mother slept in her bed,
her arms outstretched, her head
balanced between them.
5.
Beatrice took the children to the park in Cedarhurst.
The sun was shining. Airplanes
passed back and forth overhead, peaceful because the war was over.
It was the world of her imagination:
true and false were of no importance.
Freshly polished and glittering—
that was the world. Dust
had not yet erupted on the surface of things.
The planes passed back and forth, bound
for Rome and Paris—you couldn’t get there
&nb
sp; unless you flew over the park. Everything
must pass through, nothing can stop—
The children held hands, leaning
to smell the roses.
They were five and seven.
Infinite, infinite—that
was her perception of time.
She sat on a bench, somewhat hidden by oak trees.
Far away, fear approached and departed;
from the train station came the sound it made.
The sky was pink and orange, older because the day was over.
There was no wind. The summer day
cast oak-shaped shadows on the green grass.
THE COUPLE IN THE PARK
A man walks alone in the park and beside him a woman walks, also alone. How does one know? It is as though a line exists between them, like a line on a playing field. And yet, in a photograph they might appear a married couple, weary of each other and of the many winters they have endured together. At another time, they might be strangers about to meet by accident. She drops her book; stooping to pick it up, she touches, by accident, his hand and her heart springs open like a child’s music box. And out of the box comes a little ballerina made of wood. I have created this, the man thinks; though she can only whirl in place, still she is a dancer of some kind, not simply a block of wood. This must explain the puzzling music coming from the trees.
ALSO BY LOUISE GLÜCK
POETRY
Firstborn
The House on Marshland
Descending Figure
The Triumph of Achilles
Ararat
The Wild Iris
Meadowlands
Vita Nova
The Seven Ages
Averno
A Village Life
Poems 1962–2012
ESSAYS
Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Louise Glück
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which some of these poems first appeared: The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Threepenny Review.
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