A Village Life

by Louise Glück

  How fast it all goes, how fast the smoke clears.

  And where the pile of leaves was,

  an emptiness that suddenly seems vast.

  Across the road, a boy’s watching.

  He stays a long time, watching the leaves burn.

  Maybe this is how you’ll know when the earth is dead—

  it will ignite.

  CROSSROADS

  My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer

  I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,

  like what I remember of love when I was young—

  love that was so often foolish in its objectives

  but never in its choices, its intensities.

  Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—

  My soul has been so fearful, so violent:

  forgive its brutality.

  As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

  not wishing to give offense

  but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

  it is not the earth I will miss,

  it is you I will miss.

  BATS

  Concerning death, one might observe

  that those with authority to speak remain silent:

  others force their way to the pulpit or

  center stage—experience

  being always preferable to theory, they are rarely

  true clairvoyants, nor is conviction

  the common aspect of insight. Look up into the night:

  if distraction through the senses is the essence of life

  what you see now appears to be a simulation of death, bats

  whirling in darkness— But man knows

  nothing of death. If how we behave is how you feel,

  this is not what death is like, this is what life is like.

  You too are blind. You too flail in darkness.

  A terrible solitude surrounds all beings who

  confront mortality. As Margulies says: death

  terrifies us all into silence.

  ABUNDANCE

  A cool wind blows on summer evenings, stirring the wheat.

  The wheat bends, the leaves of the peach trees

  rustle in the night ahead.

  In the dark, a boy’s crossing the field:

  for the first time, he’s touched a girl

  so he walks home a man, with a man’s hungers.

  Slowly the fruit ripens—

  baskets and baskets from a single tree

  so some rots every year

  and for a few weeks there’s too much:

  before and after, nothing.

  Between the rows of wheat

  you can see the mice, flashing and scurrying

  across the earth, though the wheat towers above them,

  churning as the summer wind blows.

  The moon is full. A strange sound

  comes from the field—maybe the wind.

  But for the mice it’s a night like any summer night.

  Fruit and grain: a time of abundance.

  Nobody dies, nobody goes hungry.

  No sound except the roar of the wheat.

  MIDSUMMER

  On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,

  the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls’ clothes

  and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer

  and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones

  leaping off the high rocks—bodies crowding the water.

  The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,

  marble for graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,

  buildings in cities far away.

  On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,

  but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.

  The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off

  but always there were a few left at the end—sometimes they’d keep watch,

  sometimes they’d pretend to go off with each other like the rest,

  but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.

  But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,

  fate would be a different fate.

  At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.

  After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,

  then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet

  and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,

  we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.

  And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.

  The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,

  worrying about the ones who weren’t there.

  And then finally walk home through the fields,

  because there was always work the next day.

  And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,

  eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.

  And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.

  One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.

  The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.

  And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.

  Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.

  And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,

  wanting the heat to break.

  Then the heat broke, the night was clear.

  And you thought of the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.

  And you thought of walking into the woods and lying down,

  practicing all those things you were learning in the water.

  And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,

  there was no substitute for that person.

  The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.

  And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages:

  You will leave the village where you were born

  and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,

  but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you can’t say what it was,

  and eventually you will return to seek it.

  THRESHING

  The sky’s light behind the mountain

  though the sun is gone—this light

  is like the sun’s shadow, passing over the earth.

  Before, when the sun was high,

  you couldn’t look at the sky or you’d go blind.

  That time of day, the men don’t work.

  They lie in the shade, waiting, resting;

  their undershirts are stained with sweat.

  But under the trees it’s cool,

  like the flask of water that gets passed around.

  A green awning’s over their heads, blocking the sun.

  No talk, just the leaves rustling in the heat,

  the sound of the water moving from hand to hand.

  This hour or two is the best time of day.

  Not asleep, not awake, not drunk,

  and the women far away

  so that the day becomes suddenly calm, quiet and expansive,

  without the women’s turbulence.

  The men lie under their canopy, apart from the heat,

  as though the work were done.

  Beyond the fields, the river’s soundless, motionless—

  scum mottles the surface.

  To a man, they know when the hour’s gone.

  The flask gets put away, the bread, if there’s bread.

  The leaves darken a little, the shadows change.

  The sun’s moving again, taking the me
n along,

  regardless of their preferences.

  Above the fields, the heat’s fierce still, even in decline.

  The machines stand where they were left,

  patient, waiting for the men’s return.

  The sky’s bright, but twilight is coming.

  The wheat has to be threshed; many hours remain

  before the work is finished.

  And afterward, walking home through the fields,

  dealing with the evening.

  So much time best forgotten.

  Tense, unable to sleep, the woman’s soft body

  always shifting closer—

  That time in the woods: that was reality.

  This is the dream.

  A VILLAGE LIFE

  The death and uncertainty that await me

  as they await all men, the shadows evaluating me

  because it can take time to destroy a human being,

  the element of suspense

  needs to be preserved—

  On Sundays I walk my neighbor’s dog

  so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother.

  The dog waits for me in the doorway. Summer and winter

  we walk the same road, early morning, at the base of the escarpment.

  Sometimes the dog gets away from me—for a moment or two,

  I can’t see him behind some trees. He’s very proud of this,

  this trick he brings out occasionally, and gives up again

  as a favor to me—

  Afterward, I go back to my house to gather firewood.

  I keep in my mind images from each walk:

  monarda growing by the roadside;

  in early spring, the dog chasing the little gray mice,

  so for a while it seems possible

  not to think of the hold of the body weakening, the ratio

  of the body to the void shifting,

  and the prayers becoming prayers for the dead.

  Midday, the church bells finished. Light in excess:

  still, fog blankets the meadow, so you can’t see

  the mountain in the distance, covered with snow and ice.

  When it appears again, my neighbor thinks

  her prayers are answered. So much light she can’t control her happiness—

  it has to burst out in language. Hello, she yells, as though

  that is her best translation.

  She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain,

  though in one case the fog never lifts.

  But each person stores his hope in a different place.

  I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine.

  I’m tense, like a child approaching adolescence.

  Soon it will be decided for certain what you are,

  one thing, a boy or girl. Not both any longer.

  And the child thinks: I want to have a say in what happens.

  But the child has no say whatsoever.

  When I was a child, I did not foresee this.

  Later, the sun sets, the shadows gather,

  rustling the low bushes like animals just awake for the night.

  Inside, there’s only firelight. It fades slowly;

  now only the heaviest wood’s still

  flickering across the shelves of instruments.

  I hear music coming from them sometimes,

  even locked in their cases.

  When I was a bird, I believed I would be a man.

  That’s the flute. And the horn answers,

  when I was a man, I cried out to be a bird.

  Then the music vanishes. And the secret it confides in me

  vanishes also.

  In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,

  meaningless but full of messages.

  It’s dead, it’s always been dead,

  but it pretends to be something else,

  burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes

  it could actually make something grow on earth.

  If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.

  I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,

  as though I were already a factor in it.

  Tranquil and still, the day dawns.

  On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.

  Note

  The second “Bats” is dedicated to Ellen Pinsky. The last sentence appears in a paper written by Alfred Margulies, MD, presented at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, March 5, 1998.

  ALSO BY LOUISE GLÜCK

  POETRY

  Firstborn

  The House on Marshland

  Descending Figure

  The Triumph of Achilles

  Ararat

  The Wild Iris

  Meadowlands

  Vita Nova

  The Seven Ages

  Averno

  ESSAYS

  Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2009 by Louise Glück

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2009

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which some of these poems first appeared: The American Scholar, The Electronic Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review.

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