monday poem #50: Louise Glück, "Aubade"
I am not sure what to say about Louise Glück's work except that I wish I had found it earlier so that I might have been living with it longer.
Vita Nova is a series of poems that draws heavily, but not exclusively, on stories from Greek and Roman mythology: Orpheus, Eurydice, Dido, Aeneas, Aphrodite, and Penelope all make appearances of one sort or another, and some of the poems have names like "The Winged Horse," "Inferno," and "The Golden Bough." More importantly, I think, the book is held together by some of the broadest possible themes - love, betrayal, death, sorrow, memory - combined and recombined in individual poems throughout the book.
"Just because / the past is longer than the future / doesn't mean there is no future" ("Condo"). Out of our understanding of the past we make the new life.
Aubade
The world was very large. Then
the world was small. O
very small, small enough
to fit in a brain.
It had no color, it was all
interior space: nothing
got in or out. But time
seeped in anyway, that
was the tragic dimension.
I took time very seriously in those years,
if I remember accurately.
A room with a chair, a window.
A small window, filled with the patterns light makes.
In its emptiness the world
was whole always, not
a chip of something, with
the self at the center.
And at the center of the self,
grief I thought I couldn't survive.
A room with a bed, a table. Flashes
of light on the naked surfaces.
I had two desires: desire
to be safe and desire to feel. As though
the world were making
a decision against white
because it disdained potential
and wanted in its place substance:
panels
of gold where the light struck.
In the window, reddish
leaves of the copper beech tree.
Out of the stasis, facts, objects
blurred or knitted together: somewhere
time stirring, time
crying to be touched, to be
palpable,
the polished wood
shimmering with distinctions-
and then I was once more
a child in the presence of riches
and I didn't know what the riches were made of.
- Louise Glück
from Vita Nova
Vita Nova is a series of poems that draws heavily, but not exclusively, on stories from Greek and Roman mythology: Orpheus, Eurydice, Dido, Aeneas, Aphrodite, and Penelope all make appearances of one sort or another, and some of the poems have names like "The Winged Horse," "Inferno," and "The Golden Bough." More importantly, I think, the book is held together by some of the broadest possible themes - love, betrayal, death, sorrow, memory - combined and recombined in individual poems throughout the book.
"Just because / the past is longer than the future / doesn't mean there is no future" ("Condo"). Out of our understanding of the past we make the new life.
Aubade
The world was very large. Then
the world was small. O
very small, small enough
to fit in a brain.
It had no color, it was all
interior space: nothing
got in or out. But time
seeped in anyway, that
was the tragic dimension.
I took time very seriously in those years,
if I remember accurately.
A room with a chair, a window.
A small window, filled with the patterns light makes.
In its emptiness the world
was whole always, not
a chip of something, with
the self at the center.
And at the center of the self,
grief I thought I couldn't survive.
A room with a bed, a table. Flashes
of light on the naked surfaces.
I had two desires: desire
to be safe and desire to feel. As though
the world were making
a decision against white
because it disdained potential
and wanted in its place substance:
panels
of gold where the light struck.
In the window, reddish
leaves of the copper beech tree.
Out of the stasis, facts, objects
blurred or knitted together: somewhere
time stirring, time
crying to be touched, to be
palpable,
the polished wood
shimmering with distinctions-
and then I was once more
a child in the presence of riches
and I didn't know what the riches were made of.
- Louise Glück
from Vita Nova