Ren Hang / Gift

 

Photo by Ren Hang

Gift

by Ren Hang 

 Ren Hang / El regalo

Life is really one
Precious gift
But sometimes I feel that
It has been given to the wrong person

 

Louise Glück / Love Poem

Love Poem

by Louise Glück

There is always something to be made of pain.
Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another.

Louise Glück / Parable of the Swans

 

Parable of the Swans

BY LOUISE GLÜCK

Louise Glück / Parábola de los cisnes

On a small lake off

the map of the world, two

swans lived. As swans,

they spent eighty percent of the day studying

themselves in the attentive water and

twenty percent ministering to the beloved

other. Thus

their fame as lovers stems

chiefly from narcissism, which leaves

so little leisure for

more general cruising. But

fate had other plans: after ten years, they hit

slimy water; whatever the filth was, it

clung to the male’s plumage, which turned

instantly gray; simultaneously,

the true purpose of his neck’s

flexible design revealed itself. So much

action on the flat lake, so much

he’s missed! Sooner or later in a long

life together, every couple encounters

some emergency like this, some

drama which results

in harm. This

occurs for a reason: to test

love and to demand

fresh articulation of its complex terms.

So it came to light that the male and female

flew under different banners: whereas

the male believed that love

was what one felt in one’s heart

the female believed

love was what one did. But this is not

a little story about the male’s

inherent corruption, using as evidence the swan’s

sleazy definition of purity. It is

a story of guile and innocence. For ten years

the female studied the male; she dallied

when he slept or when he was

conveniently absorbed in the water,

while the spontaneous male

acted casually, on

the whim of the moment. On the muddy water

they bickered awhile, in the fading light,

until the bickering grew

slowly abstract, becoming

part of their song

after a little longer.

"Parable of the Swans" by Louise Glück

From Meadowlands, 1996 

Louise Glück / Gretel in Darkness

.

.

.

Gretel in Darkness

by Louise Glück

Louise Glück / Gretel en la oscuridad

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead

are dead. I hear the witch’s cry

break in the moonlight through a sheet

of sugar: God rewards.

Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

 

Now, far from women’s arms

and memory of women, in our father’s hut

we sleep, are never hungry.

Why do I not forget?

My father bars the door, bars harm

from this house, and it is years.

 

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though

you 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 me

but you are not there.

Am I alone? Spies

hiss in the stillness, Hansel,

we are there still and it is real, real,

that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Louise Glück / All Hallows

Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

All Hallows

by Louise Glück

 

Louise Glück / Todos los Santos

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

 

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

 

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

.

.

.

Louise Glück / The Edge

 

Alex Colville

THE EDGE

By Louise Glück

Louise Glück / El límite

Time and again, time and again I tie

My heart to that headboard

While my quilted cries

Harden against his hand. He’s bored-

I see it. Don’t I lick his bribes, set his bouquets

In water? Over Mother’s lace I watch him drive into the gored

Roasts, deal slivers in his mercy… I can feel his thights

Against me for the children’s sakes. Reward?

Mornings, crippled with this house,

I see him toast his toast and test

His coffee,  hedgingly. The waste’s my breakfast.

Louise Glück / The Mirror

 

THE MIRROR

by Louise Glück

Louise Glück / El espejo

Louise Glück / O espelho

Watching you in the mirror I wonder

what it is like to be so beautiful

and why you do not love

but cut yourself, shaving

like a blind man. I think you let me stare

so you can turn against violence,

needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away

scornfully and without hesitation

until I see you correctly,

as a man bleeding, not

the reflection I desire.

Louise Glück / April

 

Louise Glück

April

by Louise Glück

No one's despair is like my despair--

You have no place in this garden
thinking such things, producing
the tiresome outward signs; the man
pointedly weeding an entire forest,
the woman limping, refusing to change clothes
or wash her hair.

Do you suppose I care
if you speak to one another?
But I mean you to know
I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind, for me
to know you, as deep blue
marks the wild scilla, white
the wood violet.

Louise Glück / Dawn

 

Louise Glück

Dawn

BY LOUISE GLÜCK

1

Child waking up in a dark room

screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

in a language nobody understands in the least —

There is no duck.

But the dog, all upholstered in white plush —

the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

Years and years — that’s how much time passes.

All in a dream. But the duck —

no one knows what happened to that.

2

They’ve  just met, now

they’re sleeping near an open window.

Partly to wake them, to assure them

that what they remember of  the night is correct,

now light needs to enter the room,

also to show them the context in which this occurred:

socks half  hidden under a dirty mat,

quilt decorated with green leaves —

the sunlight specifying

these but not other objects,

setting boundaries, sure of  itself, not arbitrary,

then lingering, describing

each thing in detail,

fastidious, like a composition in English,

even a little blood on the sheets —

3

Afterward, they separate for the day.

Even later, at a desk, in the market,

the manager not satisfied with the figures he’s given,

the berries moldy under the topmost layer —

so that one withdraws from the world

even as one continues to take action in it —

You get home, that’s when you notice the mold.

Too late, in other words.

As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

Louise Glück / Meadowlands

 

Meadowlands by Louise Gluck

JULY 13, 2016 / ELENA NICOLAOU

I went on a kick of reading everything Penelope-related. Anything that played with the Odyssey, I read it. Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood? check. Collection of modern Greek poetry by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke? check.

HOW I missed Meadowlands by Louise Gluck is beyond me. The book of poetry uses the Odyssey, and Penelope and Odysseus’s relationship, as a springboard for exploring power dynamics in relationships, love loss distance and growing apart, etc. They’re contrasted with a modern couple bogged down with the bitterness minutiae breeds. Ancient and modern, mythical and real, it’s all the same heart, so it’s all the same shit.

 

But of course the poems I liked the best were the ones that directly talked about the Odyssey. I thought “Siren” was a nice in-between. The siren is the woman who lures Odysseus in during his journey home, but in Gluck’s poem, she’s a distinctly modern woman. We’re not sure if this is a woman that Odysseus meets, or the unnamed male in the modern couple. Either way, though, it’s the voice of the siren that sticks with you. The humanizing of the “other woman.”

Siren

I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.

I didn’t want to go to Chicago with you.
I wanted to marry you, I wanted
Your wife to suffer.

I wanted her life to be like a play
In which all the parts are sad parts.

Does a good person
Think this way? I deserve

Credit for my courage–

I sat in the dark on your front porch.
Everything was clear to me:
If your wife wouldn’t let you go
That proved she didn’t love you.
If she loved you
Wouldn’t she want you to be happy?

I think now
If I felt less I would be
A better person. I was
A good waitress.
I could carry eight drinks.

I used to tell you my dreams.
Last night I saw a woman sitting in a dark bus–
In the dream, she’s weeping, the bus she’s on
Is moving away. With one hand
She’s waving; the other strokes
An egg carton full of babies.

The dream doesn’t rescue the maiden.

***

Here’s a Penelope-centric one.

Penelope’s Stubbornness

A bird comes to the window. It’s a mistake
to think of them
as birds, they are so often
messengers. That is why, once they
plummet to the sill, they sit
so perfectly still, to mock
patience, lifting their heads to sing
poor lady, poor lady, their three-note
warning, later flying
like a dark cloud from the sill to the olive grove.
But who would send such a weightless being
to judge my life? My thoughts are deep
and my memory long; why would I envy such freedom
when I have humanity? Those
with the smallest hearts
have the greatest freedom.

I’m still thinking these poems through–poems where, as one reviewer said, “the ordinary becomes heroic”–but I loved these two in particular.

BOOKS AND ELENA