louise gluck - Popular Poems and stories from category

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.

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

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

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.
What I think is you should

I was trying to love matter.
I taped a sign over the mirror:
You cannot hate matter and love form.
It was a beautiful day, though cold.

1
Child waking up in a dark room
screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back
in a language nobody understands in the least —

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

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

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,

I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.
And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.
You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten

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