Louise Glück
Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943. Honours include: being a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize and The New Yorker's Book
Award in Poetry. Pulitzer Prize, Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award; Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; the National Book Critics Circle Award,
the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award. She has also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won
the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her honours also include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal
and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a writer-in-residence at Yale University.
Returning A Lost Child
Nurse’s Song
Nothing moves. In its cage, the broken
Blossom of a fan sways
Limply, trickling its wire, as her thin
Arms, hung like flypaper, twist about the boy.
Later, blocking the doorway, tongue
Pinned to the fat wedge of his pop, he watches
As I find the other room, the father strung
On crutches, waiting to be roused...
Now squeezed from thanks the woman’s lemonade lies
In my cup. As endlessly she picks
Her spent Kleenex into dust, always
Staring at that man, hearing the click,
Click of his brain’s whirling empty spindle...
As though I’m fooled. That lacy body managed to forget
That I have eyes, ears; dares to spring her boyfriends on the
child.
This afternoon she told me,” Dress the baby in his crochet
Dress ,” and smiled. Just that. Just smiled,
Going. She is never here. O innocence, your bathinet
Is clogged with gossip, she’s a sinking ship,
Your mother. Wouldn’t spoil her breasts.
I hear your deaf-numb papa fussing for his tea. Sleep, sleep,
My angel, nestled with your orange bear.
Scream when her lover pats your hair.
Still Life
Gratitude
Father has his arm around Tereze.
She squints. My thumb
is in my mouth: my fifth autumn.
Near the copper beech
the spaniel dozes in the shadows.
Not one of us does not avert his eyes.
Do not think I am not grateful for your small
kindness to me.
I like small kindnesses.
In fact I prefer them to the more
substantial kindness, that is always eyeing you,
like a large animal on a rug,
until your whole life reduces
to nothing but waking up morning after morning
cramped, and the bright sun shining on its tusks.
Across the lawn, in full sun, my mother
stands behind her camera.
Grandmother in the Garden
Early December in Croton-on-Hudson
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.
Spiked sun. The Hudson’s
Whittled down by ice.
I hear the bone dice
Of blown gravel clicking. BonePale, the recent snow
Fastens like fur to the river.
Standstill. We were leaving to deliver
Christmas presents when the tire blew
Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared
Down by a storm stood, limbs bared...
I want you.
Love Poem
There is always something to be made of pain.
Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another.