Free Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück Page A

a ruse to ignore
    what you see happening
    right here in this bed,
    a little paradigm
    of failure. One of your precious flowers
    dies here almost every day
    and you can’t rest until
    you attack the cause, meaning
    whatever is left, whatever
    happens to be sturdier
    than your personal passion—
    It was not meant
    to last forever in the real world.
    But why admit that, when you can go on
    doing what you always do,
    mourning and laying blame,
    always the two together.
    I don’t need your praise
    to survive. I was here first,
    before you were here, before
    you ever planted a garden.
    And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
    are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
    I will constitute the field.

THE JACOB’S LADDER
    Trapped in the earth,
    wouldn’t you too want to go
    to heaven? I live
    in a lady’s garden. Forgive me, lady;
    longing has taken my grace. I am
    not what you wanted. But
    as men and women seem
    to desire each other, I too desire
    knowledge of paradise—and now
    your grief, a naked stem
    reaching the porch window.
    And at the end, what? A small blue flower
    like a star. Never
    to leave the world! Is this
    not what your tears mean?

MATINS
    You want to know how I spend my time?
    I walk the front lawn, pretending
    to be weeding. You ought to know
    I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
    clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
    I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
    my life will change, though
    it takes forever, checking
    each clump for the symbolic
    leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
    the leaves turning, always the sick trees
    going first, the dying turning
    brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
    their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
    As empty now as at the first note.
    Or was the point always
    to continue without a sign?

MATINS
    What is my heart to you
    that you must break it over and over
    like a plantsman testing
    his new species? Practice
    on something else: how can I live
    in colonies, as you prefer, if you impose
    a quarantine of affliction, dividing me
    from healthy members of
    my own tribe: you do not do this
    in the garden, segregate
    the sick rose; you let it wave its sociable
    infested leaves in
    the faces of the other roses, and the tiny aphids
    leap from plant to plant, proving yet again
    I am the lowest of your creatures, following
    the thriving aphid and the trailing rose— Father,
    as agent of my solitude, alleviate
    at least my guilt; lift
    the stigma of isolation, unless
    it is your plan to make me
    sound forever again, as I was
    sound and whole in my mistaken childhood,
    or if not then, under the light weight
    of my mother’s heart, or if not then,
    in dream, first
    being that would never die.

SONG
    Like a protected heart,
    the blood-red
    flower of the wild rose begins
    to open on the lowest branch,
    supported by the netted
    mass of a large shrub:
    it blooms against the dark
    which is the heart’s constant
    backdrop, while flowers
    higher up have wilted or rotted;
    to survive
    adversity merely
    deepens its color. But John
    objects, he thinks
    if this were not a poem but
    an actual garden, then
    the red rose would be
    required to resemble
    nothing else, neither
    another flower nor
    the shadowy heart, at
    earth level pulsing
    half maroon, half crimson.

FIELD FLOWERS
    What are you saying? That you want
    eternal life? Are your thoughts really
    as compelling as all that? Certainly
    you don’t look at us, don’t listen to us,
    on your skin
    stain of sun, dust
    of yellow buttercups: I’m talking
    to you, you staring through
    bars of high grass shaking
    your little rattle— O
    the soul! the soul! Is it enough
    only to look inward? Contempt
    for humanity is one thing, but why
    disdain the expansive
    field, your gaze rising over the clear heads
    of the wild buttercups into what? Your poor
    idea of heaven: absence
    of change. Better than earth? How
    would you know, who are neither
    here nor