Louise Glück

It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.

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

The Triumph Of AchillesIn the story of Patroclusno one survives, not even Achilleswho was nearly a god.Patroclus resembled him; they worethe same armor.Always in these friendshipsone serves the other, one is less than the other:the hierarchyis always apparent, though the legendscannot be trusted--their source is the survivor,the one who has been abandoned.What were the Greek ships on firecompared to this loss?In his tent, Achillesgrieved with his whole beingand the gods sawhe was a man already dead, a victimof the part that loved,the part that was mortal.

A word drops into the mistlike a child's ball into high grasswhere it remains seductivelyflashing and glinting untilthe gold bursts are revealed to besimply field buttercups.Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me.

Living things don't all requirelight in the same degree. Some of usmake our own light: a silver leaflike a path no one can use, a shallowlake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.But you know this already.You and the others who thinkyou live for truth and, by extension, loveall that is cold.

(after many years) we were still at that first stage, stillpreparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;we could see this in one another; we had changed althoughwe never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, travelingfrom day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemedin a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purposebelieved this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain freein order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed.

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.

Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.

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.

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners_ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.

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.

I think here I will leave you. It has come to seemthere is no perfect ending.Indeed, there are infinite endings.Or perhaps, once one begins,there are only endings.

I don__ need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I__l be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide field.I will constitute the field.

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.

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

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

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

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__ 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__ublime, 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.