Стихи и рассказы в категории Louise gluck. Читать онлайн

You’re stepping on your father, my mother said,
and indeed I was standing exactly in the center
of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been
my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so.

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

—After Robert Pinsky
Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener
Of the sealed passageways, so that
Sunlight entering the nose can once again

Spiked sun. The Hudson’s
Whittled down by ice.
I hear the bone dice
Of blown gravel clicking. Bone-

Two women with
the same claim
came to the feet of
the wise king. Two women,

I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean
your cold feet all over my dick.
Someone should teach you how to act in bed.

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,

The nights have grown cool again, like the nights
of early spring, and quiet again. Will
speech disturb you? We're
alone now; we have no reason for silence.

I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.
Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

Sometime after I had entered

On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the…

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.
You wanted to be born; I let you be born.

You see, they have no judgment.
So it is natural that they should drown,
first the ice taking them in
and then, all winter, their wool scarves

Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

On a small lake off
the map of the world, two
swans lived. As swans,
they spent eighty percent of the day studying

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.
I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally

Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.

You saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

Mother died last night,
Mother who never dies.
Winter was in the air

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

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

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been