THE WILD IRIS by Louise Glück

THE WILD IRIS

"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 seawater." Page 1

"Who else would so envy the bond we had then as to tell us it was not earth

but heaven we were losing?" page 44

"EARLY DARKNESS

How can you say

carth should give me joy? Each thing

born is my burden; I cannot succeed

with all of you.

And you would like to dictate to me,

you would like to tell me

who among you is most valuable,

who most resembles me.

And you hold up as an example

the pure life, the detachment

you struggle to achieve-

How can you understand me

when you cannot understand yourselves?

Your memory is not

powerful enough, it will not 

reach back far enough-

Never forget you are my children.

You are not suffering because you touched each other

but because you were born,

because you required life

separate from me. " page 45

"the first rains of autumn shaking the white lilies-

When you go, you go absolutely, deducting visible life from all things

but not all life,

lest we turn from you. "page 55

"SEPTEMBER TWILIGHT

I gathered you together,

I can dispense with you-

I'm tired of you, chaos

of the living world-

I can only extend myself

for so long to a living thing.

I summoned you into existence

by opening my mouth, by lifting

my little finger, shimmering

blues of the wild

aster, blossom

of the lily, immense,

gold-veined-

you come and go; eventually

I forget your names.

You come and go, every one of you

flawed in some way,

in some way compromised: you are worth

one life, no more than that.

I gathered you together;

I can erase you

as though you were a draft to be thrown away,

an exercise

because I've finished you, vision

of deepest mourning." page 60

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

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A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim

"He not busy being born is busy dying." Bob Dylan

"Dusk was falling quickly. It is was just after 7 p.m., and the month was October."

- patricia Highsmith, A Dog's Ransom

"I am writing this story of my mother, first of all because I think I know more about her and how she came to her death then any outside investigator who might, with the help of religious, psychological, or sociological guide to the interpretatin of dreams, arrive at a  facile explanation of this interesting case of suicide; but second in my own interest, because having something to do brings me back to life; and lastly because, like an outside investigator, though in a different way, I would like to represent this VOLUNTARY DEATH as an exemplary case." page 5

"This may in his time have been true for my grandfather, the first in a long line of peasants fettered by poverty to own anything at all, let alone a house and a piece of land." page 8

"The fortune teller at our church fairs took a serious interest only in the palms of the young men; a girl's future was a joke." page 10

"And what was "politics"? A meaningless word, because, from your schoolbooks on, everything connected with politics had been dished out in catchwords unrelated to any tan-gible reality and even such images as were used were devoid of human content: oppression as chains or boot heel, freedom as mountaintop, the economic system as a reassuringly smoking factory chimney or as a pipe enjoyed after the day's work, the social system as a descending ladder:"Emperor-King-Nobleman-Bur-gher-Peasant-Weaver-Carpenter-Beggar-Gravedigger"; a game, incidentally, that could be played properly only in the prolific families of peasants, carpenters, and weavers." page 15

"She wasn't lonely; at most, she sensed that she was only a falf. But there was no one to supply the other half. "We rounded each other out so well," she said, thinking back on her days with the savings-bank clerk; that was her idea of eternal love." page 24

"The word "poverty" was a fine, Somehow noble word. ) It evoked an image out of old Schoolbooks: poor but clean. Cleanliness made the poor socially acceptable. Social progress meant teaching people to be clean; once the indigent had been cleaned up, " poverty" became a title of honor. Even in the eyes of the poor, the squalor of destitution applied only to the filthy riffraff of foreign countries." Page 38

"To ber, every book was an account of her own afe, and in reading she came to life, for the first time, the ame out of her shell, the learned to talk about herself; md with each book she had more ideas on the subject ittle by little, I learned something about her." page 44

"Politicians live in another world. When you asked them a question, they didn't answer; they merely stated their position. "You can't talk about most things anyway." Politics was concerned only with the things that could be talking about; you had to handle the rest of yourself, or leave it to God.  And besides, if a politician were to take an interest in your personally, you'd  bolt. That would be getting too intimidate." page 48

"I can't stand it in the house anymore, so I'm always gadding about somewhere. I've been getting up the little earlier, that's the hardest time for me; I have to force myself to do something, or I'd just go back to bad. There's a terrible loneliness inside me, I don't feel like talking to anyone." page 58

"All the Jukeboxes in the region had a record titled WORLD-WEARY POLKA" page 69

"Horror is something perfectly natural: the mind's horror vacui. A thought is taking shape, then suddenly it notices that there is nothing more to think. Whereupon it crashes to the ground like a figure in a comic strip who suddenly realizes that he has been walking on air.

Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail." page 70