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Afterword

Reading what I have just written, I now believe

I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been

slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly

but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort

sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.


Why did I stop? Did some instinct

discern a shape, the artist in me

intervening to stop traffic, as it were?


A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,

intuited in those few long ago hours—


I must have thought so once.

And yet I dislike the term

which seems to me a crutch, a phase,

the adolescence of the mind, perhaps—


Still, it was a term I used myself,

frequently to explain my failures.

Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings

now seem to me simply

local symmetries, metonymic

baubles within immense confusion—


Chaos was what I saw.

My brush froze—I could not paint it.


Darkness, silence: that was the feeling.


What did we call it then?

A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed,

to the tree that confronted my parents,


but whereas they were forced

forward into the obstacle,

I retreated or fled—


Mist covered the stage (my life).

Characters came and went, costumes were changed,

my brush hand moved side to side

far from the canvas,

side to side, like a windshield wiper.


Surely this was the desert, the dark night.

(In reality, a crowded street in London,

the tourists waving their colored maps.)


One speaks a word: I.

Out of this stream

the great forms—


I took a deep breath. And it came to me

the person who drew that breath

was not the person in my story, his childish hand

confidently wielding the crayon—


Had I been that person? A child but also

an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom

the vegetation parts—


And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted

solitude Kant perhaps experienced

on his way to the bridges—

(We share a birthday.)


Outside, the festive streets

were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights.

A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder

singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano—


Bravo! the door is shut.

Now nothing escapes, nothing enters—


I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert

stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)

on all sides, shifting as I speak,


so that I was constantly

face to face with blankness, that

stepchild of the sublime,


which, it turns out,

has been both my subject and my medium.


What would my twin have said, had my thoughts

reached him?


Perhaps he would have said

in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument)

after which I would have been

referred to religion, the cemetery where

questions of faith are answered.


The mist had cleared. The empty canvases

were turned inward against the wall.


The little cat is dead (so the song went).


Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.

And the sun says yes.

And the desert answers

your voice is sand scattered in wind.


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Louise Glück

Louise Elisabeth Glück (/ɡlɪk/;born April 22, 1943) is an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges p…
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