Louise Glück

You see, they have no judgment. So it is natural that they should drown, first the ice taking them in and then, all winter, their wool scarves floating behind them as they sink until at last they are quiet. And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms. But death must come to them differently, so close to the beginning. As though they had always been blind and weightless. Therefore the rest is dreamed, the lamp, the good white cloth that covered the table, their bodies. And yet they hear the names they used like lures slipping over the pond: What are you waiting for come home, come home, lost in the waters, blue and permanent

1 Child waking up in a dark room screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back in a language nobody understands in the least — There is no duck. But the dog, all upholstered in white plush — the dog is right there in the crib next to him. Years and years — that’s how much time passes. All in a dream. But the duck — no one knows what happened to that. 2 They’ve  just met, now they’re sleeping near an open window. Partly to wake them, to assure them that what they remember of  the night is correct, now light needs to enter the room, also to show them the context in which this occurred: socks half  hidden under a dirty mat, quilt decorated with green leaves — the sunlight specifying these but not other objects, setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary, then lingering, describing each thing in detail, fastidious, like a composition in English, even a little blood on the sheets — 3 Afterward, they separate for the day. Even later, at a desk, in the market, the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given, the berries moldy under the topmost layer — so that one withdraws from the world even as one continues to take action in it — You get home, that’s when you notice the mold. Too late, in other words. As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

I was trying to love matter. I taped a sign over the mirror: You cannot hate matter and love form. It was a beautiful day, though cold. This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture. .......your poem: tried, but could not. I taped a sign over the first sign: Cry , weep , thrash yourself , rend your garments — List of things to love: dirt, food, shells, human hair. ....... said tasteless excess. Then I rent the signs. AIAIAIAI cried the naked mirror.

I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean your cold feet all over my dick. Someone should teach you how to act in bed. What I think is you should keep your extremities to yourself. Look what you did— you made the cat move. But I didn’t want your hand there. I wanted your hand here. You should pay attention to my feet. You should picture them the next time you see a hot fifteen year old. Because there’s a lot more where those feet come from.

Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence. And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one

Reading what I have just written, I now believe I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes. Why did I stop? Did some instinct discern a shape, the artist in me intervening to stop traffic, as it were? A shape. Or fate, as the poets say, intuited in those few long ago hours— I must have thought so once. And yet I dislike the term which seems to me a crutch, a phase, the adolescence of the mind, perhaps— Still, it was a term I used myself, frequently to explain my failures. Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings now seem to me simply local symmetries, metonymic baubles within immense confusion— Chaos was what I saw. My brush froze—I could not paint it. Darkness, silence: that was the feeling. What did we call it then? A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed, to the tree that confronted my parents, but whereas they were forced forward into the obstacle, I retreated or fled— Mist covered the stage (my life). Characters came and went, costumes were changed, my brush hand moved side to side far from the canvas, side to side, like a windshield wiper. Surely this was the desert, the dark night. (In reality, a crowded street in London, the tourists waving their colored maps.) One speaks a word:I. Out of this stream the great forms— I took a deep breath. And it came to me the person who drew that breath was not the person in my story, his childish hand confidently wielding the crayon— Had I been that person? A child but also an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom the vegetation parts— And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted solitude Kant perhaps experienced on his way to the bridges— (We share a birthday.) Outside, the festive streets were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights. A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano— Bravo! the door is shut. Now nothing escapes, nothing enters— I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems) on all sides, shifting as I speak, so that I was constantly face to face with blankness, that stepchild of the sublime, which, it turns out, has been both my subject and my medium. What would my twin have said, had my thoughts reached him? Perhaps he would have said in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument) after which I would have been referred to religion, the cemetery where questions of faith are answered. The mist had cleared. The empty canvases were turned inward against the wall. The little cat is dead(so the song went). Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks. And the sun says yes. And the desert answers your voice is sand scattered in wind.

You’re stepping on your father, my mother said, and indeed I was standing exactly in the center of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so. You’re stepping on your father, she repeated, louder this time, which began to be strange to me, since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it. I moved slightly to the side, to where my father ended and my mother began. The cemetery was silent. Wind blew through the trees; I could hear, very faintly, sounds of  weeping several rows away, and beyond that, a dog wailing. At length these sounds abated. It crossed my mind I had no memory of   being driven here, to what now seemed a cemetery, though it could have been a cemetery in my mind only; perhaps it was a park, or if not a park, a garden or bower, perfumed, I now realized, with the scent of roses — douceur de vivre filling the air, the sweetness of  living, as the saying goes. At some point, it occurred to me I was alone. Where had the others gone, my cousins and sister, Caitlin and Abigail? By now the light was fading. Where was the car waiting to take us home? I then began seeking for some alternative. I felt an impatience growing in me, approaching, I would say, anxiety. Finally, in the distance, I made out a small train, stopped, it seemed, behind some foliage, the conductor lingering against a doorframe, smoking a cigarette. Do not forget me, I cried, running now over many plots, many mothers and fathers —