Louise Glück

You saved me, you should remember me. The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. I remember sounds like that from my childhood, laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, something like that. Lugano. Tables under the apple trees. Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags. And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water; perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him. Crucial sounds or gestures like a track laid down before the larger themes and then unused, buried. Islands in the distance. My mother holding out a plate of little cakes— as far as I remember, changed in no detail, the moment vivid, intact, having never been exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age hungry for life, utterly confident— By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green pieced into the dark existing ground. 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.

1 Sometime after I had entered that time of   life people prefer to allude to in others but not in themselves, in the middle of the night the phone rang. It rang and rang as though the world needed me, though really it was the reverse. I lay in bed, trying to analyze the ring. It had my mother’s persistence and my father’s pained embarrassment. When I picked it up, the line was dead. Or was the phone working and the caller dead? Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps? 2 My mother and father stood in the cold on the front steps. My mother stared at me, a daughter, a fellow female. You never think of us, she said. We read your books when they reach heaven. Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of  your sister. And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger, tightly wrapped in my mother’s arms. But for us, she said, you wouldn’t exist. And your sister — you have your sister’s soul. After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries. 3 The street was white again, all the bushes covered with heavy snow and the trees glittering, encased with ice. I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end. It seemed the longest night I had ever known, longer than the night I was born. I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say “I,” it refers to you. 4 Outside the street was silent. The receiver lay on its side among the tangled sheets, its peevish throbbing had ceased some hours before. I left it as it was; its long cord drifting under the furniture. I watched the snow falling, not so much obscuring things as making them seem larger than they were. Who would call in the middle of the night? Trouble calls, despair calls. Joy is sleeping like a baby.

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree. Here, in Vermont, country of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived, it would mean you existed. By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist exclusively in warmer climates, in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California, where are grown the unimaginable apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself to share with John and Noah the tomato crop. If there is justice in some other world, those like myself, whom nature forces into lives of abstinence, should get the lion's share of all things, all objects of hunger, greed being praise of you. And no one praises more intensely than I, with more painfully checked desire, or more deserves to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking of the perishable, the immortal fig, which does not travel.

In your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants. I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. I don’t see anything objectively. I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that’s when I’m least to be trusted. It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight. In the end, they’re wasted— I never see myself, standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand. That’s why I can’t account for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends. In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous. People like me, who seem selfless, we’re the cripples, the liars; we’re the ones who should be factored out in the interest of truth. When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges. A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers. Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas red and bright pink. If you want the truth, you have to close yourself to the older daughter, block her out: when a living thing is hurt like that, in its deepest workings, all function is altered. That’s why I’m not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind.

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 bruise-like 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 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 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 nights have grown cool again, like the nights of early spring, and quiet again. Will speech disturb you? We're alone now; we have no reason for silence. Can you see, over the garden—the full moon rises. I won't see the next full moon. In spring, when the moon rose, it meant time was endless. Snowdrops opened and closed, the clustered seeds of the maples fell in pale drifts. White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree. And in the crook, where the tree divides, leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight soft greenish-silver. 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. And you, who've been with a man— after the first cries, doesn't joy, like fear, make no sound?

On a small lake off the map of the world, two swans lived. As swans, they spent eighty percent of the day studying themselves in the attentive water and twenty percent ministering to the beloved other. Thus their fame as lovers stems chiefly from narcissism, which leaves so little leisure for more general cruising. But fate had other plans: after ten years, they hit slimy water; whatever the filth was, it clung to the male’s plumage, which turned instantly gray; simultaneously, the true purpose of his neck’s flexible design revealed itself. So much action on the flat lake, so much he’s missed! Sooner or later in a long life together, every couple encounters some emergency like this, some drama which results in harm. This occurs for a reason: to test love and to demand fresh articulation of its complex terms. So it came to light that the male and female flew under different banners: whereas the male believed that love was what one felt in one’s heart the female believed love was what one did. But this is not a little story about the male’s inherent corruption, using as evidence the swan’s sleazy definition of purity. It is a story of guile and innocence. For ten years the female studied the male; she dallied when he slept or when he was conveniently absorbed in the water, while the spontaneous male acted casually, on the whim of the moment. On the muddy water they bickered awhile, in the fading light, until the bickering grew slowly abstract, becoming part of their song after a little longer.

The Greeks are sitting on the beach wondering what to do when the war ends. No one wants to go home, back to that bony island; everyone wants a little more of what there is in Troy, more life on the edge, that sense of every day as being packed with surprises. But how to explain this to the ones at home to whom fighting a war is a plausible excuse for absence, whereas exploring one’s capacity for diversion is not. Well, this can be faced later; these are men of action, ready to leave insight to the women and children. Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased by a new strength in their forearms, which seem more golden than they did at home, some begin to miss their families a little, to miss their wives, to want to see if the war has aged them. And a few grow slightly uneasy: what if war is just a male version of dressing up, a game devised to avoid profound spiritual questions? Ah, but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens. There on the beach, discussing the various timetables for getting home, no one believed it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca; no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable affliction of the human heart: how to divide the world’s beauty into acceptable and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy, how could the Greeks know they were hostages already: who once delays the journey is already enthralled; how could they know that of their small number some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure, some by sleep, some by music?

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 —