Friday, June 19, 2015

Poem for the Weekend: Louise Glück

 

One of our finest and most decorated contemporary American poets, Louise Glück published her first book of poetry in 1968 and her most recent, Faithful and Virtuous Night, in 2014. You can find an article about her life and career here.

Grandmother in the Garden

by Louise Glück

The grass below the willow
Of my daughter’s wash is curled
With earthworms, and the world
Is measured into row on row
Of unspiced houses, painted to seem real.
The drugged Long Island summer sun drains
Pattern from those empty sleeves, beyond my grandson
Squealing in his pen. I have survived my life.
The yellow daylight lines the oak leaf
And the wire vines melt with the unchanged changes
Of the baby. My children have their husband’s hands.
My husband’s framed, propped bald as a baby on their pianos,
My tremendous man. I close my eyes. And all the clothes
I have thrown out come back to me, the hollows
Of my daughters’ slips… they drift; I see the sheer
Summer cottons drift, equivalent to air.

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"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka