Louise Gluck
Several weeks ago I discovered
a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face
flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The
dogs
were sleeping at her feet
where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all
photographs.
I wiped the dust from my
mother’s face.
Indeed, dust covered
everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that
protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an
assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.
The sun moved lower in the
sky, the shadows lengthened and darkened.
The more dust I removed, the
more these shadows grew.
Summer arrived. The
children
leaned over the rose border,
their shadows
merging with the shadows of
the roses.
A word came into my head,
referring
to this shifting and changing,
these erasures
that were now
obvious—
it appeared, and as quickly
vanished.
Was it blindness or darkness,
peril, confusion?
Summer arrived, then autumn.
The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a
mash of bronze and sienna.
2
When I had recovered somewhat
from these events,
I replaced the photograph as I
had found it
between the pages of an
ancient paperback,
many parts of which had
been
annotated in the margins,
sometimes in words but more often
in spirited questions and
exclamations
meaning “I agree” or “I’m
unsure, puzzled—”
The ink was faded. Here and
there I couldn’t tell
what thoughts occurred to the
reader
but through the bruise-like
blotches I could sense
urgency, as though tears had
fallen.
I held the book awhile.
It was Death in
Venice (in translation);
I had noted the page in case,
as Freud believed,
nothing is an
accident.
Thus the little
photograph
was buried again, as the past
is buried in the future.
In the margin there were two
words,
linked by an arrow:
“sterility” and, down the page, “oblivion”—
“And it seemed to him the pale
and lovely
summoner out there smiled at
him and beckoned...”
3
How quiet the garden is;
no breeze ruffles the
Cornelian cherry.
Summer has come.
How quiet it is
now that life has triumphed.
The rough
pillars of the sycamores
support the immobile
shelves of the
foliage,
the lawn beneath
lush, iridescent—
And in the middle of the
sky,
the immodest god.
Things are, he says. They are,
they do not change;
response does not
change.
How hushed it is, the
stage
as well as the audience; it
seems
breathing is an
intrusion.
He must be very close,
the grass is
shadowless.
How quiet it is, how
silent,
like an afternoon in
Pompeii.
4
Beatrice took the children to
the park in Cedarhurst.
The sun was shining.
Airplanes
passed back and forth
overhead, peaceful because the war was over.
It was the world of her
imagination:
true and false were of no
importance.
Freshly polished and
glittering—
that was the world. Dust
had not yet erupted on the
surface of things.
The planes passed back and
forth, bound
for Rome and Paris—you
couldn’t get there
unless you flew over the park.
Everything
must pass through, nothing can
stop—
The children held hands,
leaning
to smell the roses.
They were five and
seven.
Infinite, infinite—that
was her perception of
time.
She sat on a bench, somewhat
hidden by oak trees.
Far away, fear approached and
departed;
from the train station came
the sound it made.
The sky was pink and orange,
older because the day was over.
There was no wind. The summer
day
cast oak-shaped shadows on the
green grass.
Source: Poetry (January 2012).
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