Louise Gluck

“Lived to see you throwingMe aside. That foughtlike netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbingIn my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to seeThat all flushed downThe refuse. Done?It lives in me.You live in me. Malignant.Love, you ever want me, don’t.”

“As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie on the couchwith the Timesover his face,so that death, when it came,wouldn't seem a significant change.”

“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.”

“It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.”

“Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.”

“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 doubtyou 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...”

“Tell me this is the future,I won’t believe you.Tell me I’m living,I won’t believe you.”

“crying yes risk joy”

“...whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.”

“I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end, not a suspension: the senses wouldn’t protect me. 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.”

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

“Gretel in Darkness:This is the world we wanted.All who would have seen us deadare dead. I hear the witch's crybreak in the moonlight through a sheetof sugar: God rewards.Her tongue shrivels into gas....Now, far from women's armsAnd memory of women, in our father's hutwe sleep, are never hungry.Why do I not forget?My father bars the door, bars harmfrom this house, and it is years.No one remembers. Even you, my brother,summer afternoons you look at me as thoughyou meant to leave,as though it never happened.But I killed for you. I see armed firs,the spires of that gleaming kiln--Nights I turn to you to hold mebut you are not there.Am I alone? Spieshiss in the stillness, Hanselwe are there still, and it is real, real,that black forest, and the fire in earnest.”

“The unsaid, for me, exerts great power...”

“Tonight I saw myself in the dark window asthe image of my father, whose lifewas spent like this,thinking of death, to the exclusionof other sensual matters,so in the end that lifewas easy to give up, sinceit contained nothing: evenmy mother's voice couldn't make himchange or turn backas he believedthat once you can't love another human beingyou have no place in the world. ”

“Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.”

“At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.”

“Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?Through the birches, I could see the pond.The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,like a girl after her first loverturning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.But nakedness in women is always a pose.I was not transfigured. I would never be free. ”

“From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.”

“The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.”

“The great thingis not havinga mind. Feelings:oh, I have those;they govern me.”

“I think I can rememberbeing dead. Many times, in winter,I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,how can I endure the earth?”

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

“To raise the veil.To see what you're saying goodbye to.”

“Intense love always leads to mourning.”

“What was difficultwas the travel, which,on arrival, is forgotten.”

“Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.”

“Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,the dreamed as well as the lived—what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?”

“He takes her in his armsHe wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt youBut he thinksthis is a lie, so he says in the endYou're dead, nothing can hurt youwhich seems to hima more promising beginning, more true.”

“17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other. 18. The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened. ”

“Like a child, the earth's going to sleep,or so the story goes. But I'm not tired, it says.And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired”

“The Red PoppyThe great thingis not havinga mind. Feelings:oh, I have those; theygovern me. I havea lord in heavencalled the sun, and openfor him, showing himthe fire of my own heart, firelike his presence.What could such glory beif not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,were you like me once, long ago,before you were human? Did youpermit yourselvesto open once, who would neveropen again? Because in truthI am speaking nowthe way you do. I speakbecause I am shattered.”