Louise Glück

I watched the sea; I listened to the other families.
Babies everywhere: what went on in their heads?
I couldn’t imagine myself as a baby;
I couldn’t picture myself not thinking.

I couldn’t imagine myself as an adult either.
They all had terrible bodies: lax, oily, completely
committed to being male and female.

Even when we weren’t touching we were making love.

And how sad to think
of dying before finding out
anything. And to realize
how ignorant we all are most of the time,
seeing things
only from the one vantage, like a sniper.

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.

Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth—
Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.

Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.

And like everyone, I took, I was taken
I dreamed

I was betrayed:

Earth was given to me in a dream
In a dream I possessed it

Spring
descended. Or should one say
rose up again? Or should one say
broke from earth?

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

I used to smile
when my mother wept.
I hope now she could
forgive that cruelty; I hope
she understood how like
her own coldness it was,
a means of remaining
separate from what
one loves deeply.

what if war
is just a male version of dressing up,
a game devised to avoid
profound spiritual questions?

THE WHITE LILIES

As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror: it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies—
Hush, beloved. It doesn’t matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.

We have come too far together toward the end now
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means.

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

You will never know how deeply
it pleases me to see you sitting there
like independent beings,
to see you dreaming by the open window,
holding the pencils I gave you
until the summer morning disappears into writing.

Your poor
idea of heaven: absence
of change.

Noah says this is
an error of depressives, identifying
with a tree, whereas the happy heart
wanders the garden like a falling leaf, a figure for
the part, not the whole.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Coucher de soleil

Mon grand bonheur
est le son de ta voix qui
m'appelle, même dans le désespoir; le chagrin
que j'ai à ne pouvoir te répondre
par une parole que tu acceptes comme mienne.

Tu n'as de foi qu'en ta propre langue.
Alors tu investis
d'autorité des signes
que tu ne peux lire avec exactitude.

Et pourtant, toujours ta voix me parvient.
Et constamment je réponds,
ma colère passant
comme l'hiver passe. Ma tendresse
devrait t'apparaître
dans la brise du soir d'été
et dans les mots qui deviennent
ta propre réponse.

A night in summer. Sounds of a summer storm.
The great plates invisibly shifting and changing—

And in the dark room, the lovers sleeping in each other’s arms.

We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,
who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,
the stranger.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautifull.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.

My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,
with the sense that it is being tested.