The Wild Iris
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Commentary
I discovered, to my amazement, that we seem to have no poetry by Louise Gluck. This must be amended; hence the following:
Nothing is harder than the nature poem; to accurately describe the physical world, to say something beyond description while still keeping one’s description exact: harder than it seems. Much harder. Here where I live, the first Iris reticulata is just now forcing itself through the snow, a foolhardy splash of wonderful purple.
This is the very first Gluck poem I ever read. I still love it. Comments from other fans would be appreciated; I didn’t enjoy her last book as much as I wanted to, and I wonder if the fault is in me or it. Anyway, we have The Wild Iris. And it is spring.
_____________
Alan S Kornheiser, PhD
Links
Biography
[broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0E06
And a couple of Louise Gluck sites
[broken link] http://www.artstomp.com/gluck/index.htm
http://www.bomis.com/rings/Mg-gluck_louise-arts/
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
susan a · 13 April 2003
Gosh. Thank you. That is just achingly beautiful. What a wonderful start to my week.
susan a