Louise Gluck

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"Celestial Music" (1990)

"
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness-
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person-

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height-
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth-

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It’s this moment we’re both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.

�Nostos� (1996)

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

"End of Winter"

Over the still world, a bird calls waking solitary among black boughs. You wanted to be born; I let you be born. When has my grief ever gotten in the way of your pleasure? Plunging ahead into the dark and light at the same time eager for sensation as though you were some new thing, wanting to express yourselves all brilliance, all vivacity never thinking this would cost you anything, never imagining the sound of my voice as anything but part of you� you won't hear it in the other world, not clearly again, not in birdcall or human cry, not the clear sound, only persistent echoing in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye� the one continuous line that binds us to each other.

Matins (What is my heart to you)

What is my heart to you that you must break it over and over like a plantsman testing his new species? Practice on something else: how can I live in colonies, as you prefer, if you impose a quarantine of affliction, dividing me from healthy members of my own tribe: you do not do this in the garden, segregate the sick rose; you let it wave its sociable infested leaves in the faces of other roses, and the tiny aphids leap from plant to plant, proving yet again lam the lowest of your creatures, following the thriving aphid and the trailing rose � Father, as agent of my solitude, alleviate at least my guilt; lift the stigma of isolation, unless it is your plan to make me sound forever again, as | was sound and whole in my mistaken childhood, or if not then, under the light weight of my mother�s heart, or if not then, in dream, first being that would never die.

The White Rose

This is the earth? Then I don't belong here. Who are you in the lighted window, shadowed now by the fickering leaves of the wayfarer tree? Can you survive where I won't last beyond the first summer? All night the slender branches of the tree shift and rustle at the bright window. Explain my life to me, you who make no sign, though I call out to you in the night: I am not like you, I have only my body for a voice: I can't disappear into silence- And in the cold morning over the dark surface of the earth echoes of my voice drift, whiteness steadily absorbed into darkness as though you were making a sign after all to convince me you too couldn't survive here or to show me you are not the light I called to but the blackness behind it.

September Twilight

I gathered you together, I can dispense with you� I'm tired of you, chaos of the living world� I can only extend myself for so long to a living thing. I summoned you into existence by opening my mouth, by lifting my little finger, shimmering blues of the wild aster, blossom of the lily, immense, gold-veined� you come and go; eventually I forget your names. You come and go, every one of you flawed in some way, in some way compromised: you are worth one life, no more than that. I gathered you together; I can erase you as though you were a draft to be thrown away, an exercise because I've finished you, vision of deepest mourning.

Field Flowers

What are you saying? That you want eternal life? Are your thoughts really as compelling as all that? Certainly you don�t look at us, don�t listen to us, on your skin stain of sun, dust of yellow buttercups: I�m talking to you, you staring through bars of high grass shaking your little rattle� O the soul! The soul! Is it enough only to look inward? Contempt for humanity is one thing, but why disdain the expansive field, your gaze rising over the clear heads of the wild buttercups into what? Your poor idea of heaven: absence of change. Better than earth? How would you know, who are neither here nor there, standing in our midst?

Vespers (I know what you planned)

I know what you planned, what you meant to do, teaching me to love the world, making it impossible to turn away completely, to shut it out completely ever again� it is everywhere; when I close my eyes, birdsong, scent of lilac in early spring, scent of summer roses: you mean to take it away, each flower, each connection with earth� why would you wound me, why would you want me desolate in the end, unless you wanted me so starved for hope I would refuse to see that finally nothing was left to me, and would believe instead in the end you were left to me.

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