• selected poems (excerpts) by Louise Glück

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• Vita Nova: "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. -- // Crucial / sounds or gestures like / a track laid down before the larger themes // and then unused, buried. -- // 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. "
• The Untrustworthy Speaker: "Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. / I don’t see anything objectively. --"
• A Summer Garden: 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. -- // The sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and darkened. / The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew. --"
• 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. --"
• End of Winter: "-- as though you were some new thing, wanting / to express yourselves // all brilliance, all vivacity // never thinking / this would cost you anything --"
• Averno: "You die when your spirit dies. / Otherwise, you live. / You may not do a good job of it, but you go on — / something you have no choice about. -- // listen to the old one, talking about the spirit / because he can't remember anymore the word for chair. // It is terrible to be alone. / I don't mean to live alone — / to be alone, where no one hears you. // I remember the word for chair. / I want to say — I'm just no interested anymore."