by Louise Glück
because they’re changed every day.
He never uses words. Words, for him, are for making arrangements,
for doing business. Never for anger, never for tenderness.
She strokes his back. She puts her face up against it,
even though it’s like putting your face against a wall.
And the silence between them is ancient: it says
these are the boundaries.
He isn’t sleeping, not even pretending to sleep.
His breathing’s not regular: he breathes in with reluctance;
he doesn’t want to commit himself to being alive.
And he breathes out fast, like a king banishing a servant.
Beneath the silence, the sound of the sea,
the sea’s violence spreading everywhere, not finished, not finished,
his breath driving the waves—
But she knows who she is and she knows what she wants.
As long as that’s true, something so natural can’t hurt her.
PRIMAVERA
Spring comes quickly: overnight
the plum tree blossoms,
the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun
with rays coming out all around
but because the background is dirt, the sun is black.
There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear:
the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,
even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends
a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are—emblems of the resilience of life.
The birds approach eagerly.
FIGS
My mother made figs in wine—
poached with cloves, sometimes a few peppercorns.
Black figs, from our tree.
And the wine was red, the pepper left a taste of smoke in the syrup.
I used to feel I was in another country.
Before that, there’d be chicken.
In autumn, sometimes filled with wild mushrooms.
There wasn’t always time for that.
And the weather had to be right, just after the rain.
Sometimes it was just chicken, with a lemon inside.
She’d open the wine. Nothing special—
something she got from the neighbors.
I miss that wine—what I buy now doesn’t taste as good.
I make these things for my husband,
but he doesn’t like them.
He wants his mother’s dishes, but I don’t make them well.
When I try, I get angry—
He’s trying to turn me into a person I never was.
He thinks it’s a simple thing—
you cut up a chicken, throw a few tomatoes into the pan.
Garlic, if there’s garlic.
An hour later, you’re in paradise.
He thinks it’s my job to learn, not his job
to teach me. What my mother cooked, I don’t need to learn.
My hands already knew, just from smelling the cloves
while I did my homework.
When it was my turn, I was right. I did know.
The first time I tasted them, my childhood came back.
When we were young, it was different.
My husband and I—we were in love. All we ever wanted
was to touch each other.
He comes home, he’s tired.
Everything is hard—making money is hard, watching your body change
is hard. You can take these problems when you’re young—
something’s difficult for a while, but you’re confident.
If it doesn’t work out, you’ll do something else.
He minds summer most—the sun gets to him.
Here it’s merciless, you can feel the world aging.
The grass turns dry, the gardens get full of weeds and slugs.
It was the best time for us once.
The hours of light when he came home from work—
we’d turn them into hours of darkness.
Everything was a big secret—
even the things we said every night.
And slowly the sun would go down;
we’d see the lights of the city come on.
The nights were glossy with stars—stars
glittered above the high buildings.
Sometimes we’d light a candle.
But most nights, no. Most nights we’d lie there in the darkness,
with our arms around each other.
But there was a sense you could control the light—
it was a wonderful feeling; you could make the whole room
bright again, or you could lie in the night air,
listening to the cars.
We’d get quiet after a while. The night would get quiet.
But we didn’t sleep, we didn’t want to give up consciousness.
We had given the night permission to carry us along;
we lay there, not interfering. Hour after hour, each one
listening to the other’s breath, watching the light change
in the window at the end of the bed—
whatever happened in that window,
we were in harmony with it.
AT THE DANCE
Twice a year we hung the Christmas lights—
at Christmas for our Lord’s birth, and at the end of August,
as a blessing on the harvest—
near the end but before the end,
and everyone would come to see,
even the oldest people who could hardly walk—
They had to see the colored lights,
and in summer there was always music, too—
music and dancing.
For the young, it was everything.
Your life was made here—what was finished under the stars
started in the lights of the plaza.
Haze of cigarettes, the women gathered under the colored awnings
singing along with whatever songs were popular that year,
cheeks brown from the sun and red from the wine.
I remember all of it—my friends and I, how we were changed by the music,
and the women, I remember how bold they were, the timid ones
along with the others—
A spell was on us, but it was a sickness too,
the men and women choosing each other almost by accident, randomly,
and the lights glittering, misleading,
because whatever you did then you did forever—
And it seemed at the time
such a game, really—lighthearted, casual,
dissipating like smoke, like perfume between a woman’s breasts,
intense because your eyes are closed.
How were these things decided?
By smell, by feel—a man would approach a woman,
ask her to dance, but what it meant was
will you let me touch you, and the woman could say
many things, ask me later, she could say, ask me again.
Or she could say no, and turn away,
as though if nothing but you happened that night
you still weren’t enough, or she could say yes, I’d love to dance
which meant yes, I want to be touched.
SOLITUDE
It’s very dark today; through the rain,
the mountain isn’t visible. The only sound
is rain, driving life underground.
And with the rain, cold comes.
There will be no moon tonight, no stars.
The wind rose at night;
all morning it lashed against the wheat—
at noon it ended. But the storm went on,
soaking the dry fields, then flooding them—
The earth has vanished.
There’s nothing to see, only the rain
gleaming against the dark windows.
This is the resting place, where nothing moves—
Now we return to what we were,
animals living in darkness
without language or vision—
Nothing proves I’m alive.
There is only the rain, the rain is endless.
EARTHWORM
It is not sad not to be human
nor is living entirely within the earth
demeaning or empty: it is the nature of the mind
to defend its eminence, as it is the nature of those
who walk on the surface to fear the depths—one’s
position determines one’s feelings. And yet
to walk on top of a thing is not to prevail over it—
it is more the opposite, a disguised dependency,
by which the slave completes the master. Likewise
the mind disdains what it can’t control,
which will in turn destroy it. It is not painful to return
without language or vision: if, like the Buddhists,
one declines to leave
inventories of the self, one emerges in a space
the mind cannot conceive, being wholly physical, not
metaphoric. What is your word? Infinity, meaning
that which cannot be measured.
OLIVE TREES
The building’s brick, so the walls get warm in summer.
When the summer goes, they’re still warm,
especially on the south side—you feel the sun there, in the brick,
as though it meant to leave its stamp on the wall, not just sail over it
on its way to the hills. I take my breaks here, leaning against the wall,
smoking cigarettes.
The bosses don’t mind—they joke that if the business fails,
they’ll just rent wall space. Big joke—everyone laughs very loud.
But you can’t eat—they don’t want rats here, looking for scraps.
Some of the others don’t care about being warm, feeling the sun on their backs
from the warm brick. They want to know where the views are.
To me, it isn’t important what I see. I grew up in those hills;
I’ll be buried there. In between, I don’t need to keep sneaking looks.
My wife says when I say things like this my mouth goes bitter.
She loves the village—every day she misses her mother.
She misses her youth—how we met there and fell in love.
How our children were born there. She knows she’ll never go back
but she keeps hoping—
At night in bed, her eyes film over. She talks about the olive trees,
the long silver leaves shimmering in the sunlight.
And the bark, the trees themselves, so supple, pale gray like the rocks behind them.
She remembers picking the olives, who made the best brine.
I remember her hands then, smelling of vinegar.
And the bitter taste of the olives, before you knew not to eat them
fresh off the tree.
And I remind her how useless they were without people to cure them.
Brine them, set them out in the sun—
And I tell her all nature is like that to me, useless and bitter.
It’s like a trap—and you fall into it because of the olive leaves,
because they’re beautiful.
You grow up looking at the hills, how the sun sets behind them.
And the olive trees, waving and shimmering. And you realize that if you don’t get out fast
you’ll die, as though this beauty were gagging you so you couldn’t breathe—
And I tell her I know we’re trapped here. But better to be trapped
by decent men, who even re-do the lunchroom,
than by the sun and the hills. When I complain here,
my voice is heard—somebody’s voice is heard. There’s dispute, there’s anger.
But human beings are talking to each other, the way my wife and I talk.
Talking even when they don’t agree, when one of them is only pretending.
In the other life, your despair just turns into silence.
The sun disappears behind the western hills—
when it comes back, there’s no reference at all to your suffering.
So your voice dies away. You stop trying, not just with the sun,
but with human beings. And the small things that made you happy
can’t get through to you anymore.
I know things are hard here. And the owners—I know they lie sometimes.
But there are truths that ruin a life; the same way, some lies
are generous, warm and cozy like the sun on the brick wall.
So when you think of the wall, you don’t think prison.
More the opposite—you think of everything you escaped, being here.
And then my wife gives up for the night, she turns her back.
Some nights she cries a little.
Her only weapon was the truth—it is true, the hills are beautiful.
And the olive trees really are like silver.
But a person who accepts a lie, who accepts support from it
because it’s warm, it’s pleasant for a little while—
that person she’ll never understand, no matter how much she loves him.
SUNRISE
This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills,
the thyme and rosemary that grew there,
crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks
and, lower down, where there was real dirt,
competing with other things, blueberries and currants,
the small shrubby trees the bees love—
Whatever we ate smelled of the hills,
even when there was almost nothing.
Or maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.
Maybe, too, that’s what it looks like—
beautiful, like the hills, the rocks above the tree line
webbed with sweet-smelling herbs,
the small plants glittering with dew—
It was a big event to climb up there and wait for dawn,
seeing what the sun sees as it slides out from behind the rocks,
and what you couldn’t see, you imagined;
your eyes would go as far as they could, to the river, say,
and your mind would do the rest—
And if you missed a day, there was always the next,
and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter,
the hills weren’t going anywhere,
the thyme and rosemary kept coming back,
the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—
The streetlight’s off: that’s dawn here.
It’s on: that’s twilight.
Either way, no one looks up. Everyone just pushes ahead,
and the smell of the past is everywhere,
the thyme and rosemary rubbing against your clothes,
the smell of too many illusions—
I went back but I didn’t stay.
Everyone I cared about was gone,
some dead, some disappeared into one of those places that don’t exist,
the ones we dreamed about because we saw them from the top of the hills—
I had to see if the fields were still shining,
the sun telling the same lies about how beautiful the world is
when all you need to know of a place is, do people live there.
If they do, you know everything.
Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room.
Whatever was left, that was ours for a while.
But sooner or later the hills will take it back, give it to the animals.
And maybe the moon will send the seas there
and where we once lived will be a stream or river coiling arou
nd the base of the hills,
paying the sky the compliment of reflection—
Blue in summer. White when the snow falls.
A WARM DAY
Today the sun was shining
so my neighbor washed her nightdresses in the river—
she comes home with everything folded in a basket,
beaming, as though her life had just been
lengthened a decade. Cleanliness makes her happy—
it says you can begin again,
the old mistakes needn’t hold you back.
A good neighbor—we leave each other
to our privacies. Just now,
she’s singing to herself, pinning the damp wash to the line.
Little by little, days like this
will seem normal. But winter was hard:
the nights coming early, the dawns dark
with a gray, persistent rain—months of that,
and then the snow, like silence coming from the sky,
obliterating the trees and gardens.
Today, all that’s past us.
The birds are back, chattering over seeds.
All the snow’s melted; the fruit trees are covered with downy new growth.
A few couples even walk in the meadow, promising whatever they promise.
We stand in the sun and the sun heals us.
It doesn’t rush away. It hangs above us, unmoving,
like an actor pleased with his welcome.
My neighbor’s quiet a moment,
staring at the mountain, listening to the birds.
So many garments, where did they come from?
And my neighbor’s still out there,
fixing them to the line, as though the basket would never be empty—
It’s still full, nothing is finished,
though the sun’s beginning to move lower in the sky;
remember, it isn’t summer yet, only the beginning of spring;
warmth hasn’t taken hold yet, and the cold’s returning—
She feels it, as though the last bit of linen had frozen in her hands.
She looks at her hands—how old they are. It’s not the beginning, it’s the end.
And the adults, they’re all dead now.
Only the children are left, alone, growing old.
BURNING LEAVES
The dead leaves catch fire quickly.
And they burn quickly; in no time at all,
they change from something to nothing.
Midday. The sky is cold, blue;
under the fire, there’s gray earth.