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Trillium
When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.
I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see.
And as I watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
Then it wasn't possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.
Are there souls that need
death's presence, as I require protection?
I think if I speak long enough
I will answer that question, I will see
whatever they see, a ladder
reaching through the firs, whatever
calls them to exchange their lives -
Think what I understand already.
I woke up ignorant in a forest;
only a moment ago, I didn't know my voice
if one were given me
would be so full of grief, my sentences
like cries strung together.
I didn't even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me.
(-Louise Gluck)
The Wild Iris is unspeakably beautiful and not to be read alone, late at night, when very tired, which is of course exactly how I read it, and is of course precisely why I wept. I should know how to say what I mean - how to describe what it made me feel - but the only words are the poems themselves, and the nameless aching they invoked in me.
I slept long and hard and dreamlessly, longer than I meant to and then some and still I'm tired. The library waits. It's cold outside. I only want my bed and tea and Erik Satie and a warm cacooning darkness. But that will have to wait.
When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.
I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see.
And as I watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
Then it wasn't possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.
Are there souls that need
death's presence, as I require protection?
I think if I speak long enough
I will answer that question, I will see
whatever they see, a ladder
reaching through the firs, whatever
calls them to exchange their lives -
Think what I understand already.
I woke up ignorant in a forest;
only a moment ago, I didn't know my voice
if one were given me
would be so full of grief, my sentences
like cries strung together.
I didn't even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me.
(-Louise Gluck)
The Wild Iris is unspeakably beautiful and not to be read alone, late at night, when very tired, which is of course exactly how I read it, and is of course precisely why I wept. I should know how to say what I mean - how to describe what it made me feel - but the only words are the poems themselves, and the nameless aching they invoked in me.
I slept long and hard and dreamlessly, longer than I meant to and then some and still I'm tired. The library waits. It's cold outside. I only want my bed and tea and Erik Satie and a warm cacooning darkness. But that will have to wait.