Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Glück

statements you are making,
    not questions needing answers.
    How can I know you love me
    unless I see you grieve over me?

ITHACA
    The beloved doesn’t
    need to live. The beloved
    lives in the head. The loom
    is for the suitors, strung up
    like a harp with white shroud-thread.
    He was two people.
    He was the body and voice, the easy
    magnetism of a living man, and then
    the unfolding dream or image
    shaped by the woman working the loom,
    sitting there in a hall filled
    with literal-minded men.
    As you pity
    the deceived sea that tried
    to take him away forever
    and took only the first,
    the actual husband, you must
    pity these men: they don’t know
    what they’re looking at;
    they don’t know that when one loves this way
    the shroud becomes a wedding dress.

TELEMACHUS’ DETACHMENT
    When I was a child looking
    at my parents’ lives, you know
    what I thought? I thought
    heartbreaking. Now I think
    heartbreaking, but also
    insane. Also
    very funny.

PARABLE OF THE HOSTAGES
    The Greeks are sitting on the beach
    wondering what to do when the war ends. No one
    wants to go home, back
    to that bony island; everyone wants a little more
    of what there is in Troy, more
    life on the edge, that sense of every day as being
    packed with surprises. But how to explain this
    to the ones at home to whom
    fighting a war is a plausible
    excuse for absence, whereas
    exploring one’s capacity for diversion
    is not. Well, this can be faced
    later; these
    are men of action, ready to leave
    insight to the women and children.
    Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased
    by a new strength in their forearms, which seem
    more golden than they did at home, some
    begin to miss their families a little,
    to miss their wives, to want to see
    if the war has aged them. And a few grow
    slightly uneasy: what if war
    is just a male version of dressing up,
    a game devised to avoid
    profound spiritual questions? Ah,
    but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun
    calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s
    loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.
    There on the beach, discussing the various
    timetables for getting home, no one believed
    it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;
    no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable
    affliction of the human heart: how to divide
    the world’s beauty into acceptable
    and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,
    how could the Greeks know
    they were hostage already: who once
    delays the journey is
    already enthralled; how could they know
    that of their small number
    some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,
    some by sleep, some by music?

RAINY MORNING
    You don’t love the world.
    If you loved the world you’d have
    images in your poems.
    John loves the world. He has
    a motto: judge not
    lest ye be judged. Don’t
    argue this point
    on the theory it isn’t possible
    to love what one refuses
    to know: to refuse
    speech is not
    to suppress perception.
    Look at John, out in the world,
    running even on a miserable day
    like today. Your
    staying dry is like the cat’s pathetic
    preference for hunting dead birds: completely
    consistent with your tame spiritual themes,
    autumn, loss, darkness, etc.
    We can all write about suffering
    with our eyes closed. You should show people
    more of yourself; show them your clandestine
    passion for red meat.

PARABLE OF THE TRELLIS
    A clematis grew at the foot of a great trellis.
    Despite being
    modeled on a tree, the trellis
    was a human invention; every year, in May,
    the green wires of the struggling vine
    climbed the straightforward
    trellis, and after many years
    white flowers burst from the brittle wood, like
    a star shower from the heart of the garden.
    Enough of that ruse. We both know
    how the vine grows without
    the trellis, how it sneaks
    along the ground; we have both seen it
    flower there, the white blossoms
    like headlights growing out of a snake.
    This