A Village Life
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Twilight
Pastoral
Tributaries
Noon
Before the Storm
Sunset
In the Café
In the Plaza
Dawn
First Snow
Earthworm
At the River
A Corridor
Fatigue
Burning Leaves
Walking at Night
Via Delle Ombre
Hunters
A Slip of Paper
Bats
Burning Leaves
March
A Night in Spring
Harvest
Confession
Marriage
Primavera
Figs
At the Dance
Solitude
Earthworm
Olive Trees
Sunrise
A Warm Day
Burning Leaves
Crossroads
Bats
Abundance
Midsummer
Threshing
A Village Life
Note
Also by Louise Glück
Copyright
TO JAMES LONGENBACH
TWILIGHT
All day he works at his cousin’s mill,
so when he gets home at night, he always sits at this one window,
sees one time of day, twilight.
There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.
It’s as his cousin says:
Living—living takes you away from sitting.
In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape
representing the world. The seasons change,
each visible only a few hours a day.
Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness—
abstractions from which come intense pleasures,
like the figs on the table.
At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.
It goes down late in summer—sometimes it’s hard to stay awake.
Then everything falls away.
The world for a little longer
is something to see, then only something to hear,
crickets, cicadas.
Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.
Then sleep takes this away also.
But it’s easy to give things up like this, experimentally,
for a matter of hours.
I open my fingers—
I let everything go.
Visual world, language,
rustling of leaves in the night,
smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.
I let it go, then I light the candle.
PASTORAL
The sun rises over the mountain.
Sometimes there’s mist
but the sun’s behind it always
and the mist isn’t equal to it.
The sun burns its way through,
like the mind defeating stupidity.
When the mist clears, you see the meadow.
No one really understands
the savagery of this place,
the way it kills people for no reason,
just to keep in practice.
So people flee—and for a while, away from here,
they’re exuberant, surrounded by so many choices—
But no signal from earth
will ever reach the sun. Thrash
against that fact, you are lost.
When they come back, they’re worse.
They think they failed in the city,
not that the city doesn’t make good its promises.
They blame their upbringing: youth ended and they’re back,
silent, like their fathers.
Sundays, in summer, they lean against the wall of the clinic,
smoking cigarettes. When they remember,
they pick flowers for their girlfriends—
It makes the girls happy.
They think it’s pretty here, but they miss the city, the afternoons
filled with shopping and talking, what you do
when you have no money …
To my mind, you’re better off if you stay;
that way, dreams don’t damage you.
At dusk, you sit by the window. Wherever you live,
you can see the fields, the river, realities
on which you cannot impose yourself—
To me, it’s safe. The sun rises; the mist
dissipates to reveal
the immense mountain. You can see the peak,
how white it is, even in summer. And the sky’s so blue,
punctuated with small pines
like spears—
When you got tired of walking
you lay down in the grass.
When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you’d been,
the grass was slick there, flattened out
into the shape of a body. When you looked back later,
it was as though you’d never been there at all.
Midafternoon, midsummer. The fields go on forever,
peaceful, beautiful.
Like butterflies with their black markings,
the poppies open.
TRIBUTARIES
All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.
Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—
The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;
on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.
In summer, couples sit at the pool’s edge.
There’s room in the pool for many reflections—
the plaza’s nearly empty, the acacia trees don’t get this far.
And the Avenue of Liberty is barren and austere; its image
doesn’t crowd the water.
Interspersed with the couples, mothers with their younger children.
Here’s where they come to talk to one another, maybe
meet a young man, see if there’s anything left of their beauty.
When they look down, it’s a sad moment: the water isn’t encouraging.
The husbands are off working, but by some miracle
all the amorous young men are always free—
they sit at the edge of the fountain, splashing their sweethearts
with fountain water.
Around the fountain, there are clusters of metal tables.
This is where you sit when you’re old,
beyond the intensities of the fountain.
The fountain is for the young, who still want to look at themselves.
Or for the mothers, who need to keep their children diverted.
In good weather, a few old people linger at the tables.
Life is simple now: one day cognac, one day coffee and a cigarette.
To the couples, it’s clear who’s on the outskirts of life, who’s at the center.
The children cry, they sometimes fight over toys.
But the water’s there, to remind the mothers that they love these children;
that for them to drown would be terrible.
The mothers are tired constantly, the children are always fighting,
the husbands at work or angry. No young man comes.
The couples are like an image from s
ome faraway time, an echo coming
very faint from the mountains.
They’re alone at the fountain, in a dark well.
They’ve been exiled by the world of hope,
which is the world of action,
but the world of thought hasn’t as yet opened to them.
When it does, everything will change.
Darkness is falling, the plaza empties.
The first leaves of autumn litter the fountain.
The roads don’t gather here anymore;
the fountain sends them away, back into the hills they came from.
Avenue of Broken Faith, Avenue of Disappointment,
Avenue of the Acacia Trees, of Olive Trees,
the wind filling with silver leaves,
Avenue of Lost Time, Avenue of Liberty that ends in stone,
not at the field’s edge but at the foot of the mountain.
NOON
They’re not grown up—more like a boy and girl, really.
School’s over. It’s the best part of the summer, when it’s still beginning—
the sun’s shining, but the heat isn’t intense yet.
And freedom hasn’t gotten boring.
So you can spend the whole day, all of it, wandering in the meadow.
The meadow goes on indefinitely, and the village keeps getting more and more faint—
It seems a strange position, being very young.
They have this thing everyone wants and they don’t want—
but they want to keep it anyway; it’s all they can trade on.
When they’re by themselves like this, these are the things they talk about.
How time for them doesn’t race.
It’s like the reel breaking at the movie theater. They stay anyway—
mainly, they just don’t want to leave. But till the reel is fixed,
the old one just gets popped back in,
and all of a sudden you’re back to long ago in the movie—
the hero hasn’t even met the heroine. He’s still at the factory,
he hasn’t begun to go bad. And she’s wandering around the docks, already bad.
But she never meant it to happen. She was good, then it happened to her,
like a bag pulled over her head.
The sky’s completely blue, so the grass is dry.
They’ll be able to sit with no trouble.
They sit, they talk about everything—then they eat their picnic.
They put the food on the blanket, so it stays clean.
They’ve always done it this way; they take the grass themselves.
The rest—how two people can lie down on the blanket—
they know about it but they’re not ready for it.
They know people who’ve done it, as a kind of game or trial—
then you say, no, wrong time, I think I’ll just keep being a child.
But your body doesn’t listen. It knows everything now,
it says you’re not a child, you haven’t been a child for a long time.
Their thinking is, stay away from change. It’s an avalanche—
all the rocks sliding down the mountain, and the child standing underneath
just gets killed.
They sit in the best place, under the poplars.
And they talk—it must be hours now, the sun’s in a different place.
About school, about people they both know,
about being adult, about how you knew what your dreams were.
They used to play games, but that’s stopped now—too much touching.
They only touch each other when they fold the blanket.
They know this in each other.
That’s why it isn’t talked about.
Before they do anything like that, they’ll need to know more—
in fact, everything that can happen. Until then, they’ll just watch
and stay children.
Today she’s folding the blanket alone, to be safe.
And he looks away—he pretends to be too lost in thought to help out.
They know that at some point you stop being children, and at that point
you become strangers. It seems unbearably lonely.
When they get home to the village, it’s nearly twilight.
It’s been a perfect day; they talk about this,
about when they’ll have a chance to have a picnic again.
They walk through the summer dusk,
not holding hands but still telling each other everything.
BEFORE THE STORM
Rain tomorrow, but tonight the sky is clear, the stars shine.
Still, the rain’s coming,
maybe enough to drown the seeds.
There’s a wind from the sea pushing the clouds;
before you see them, you feel the wind.
Better look at the fields now,
see how they look before they’re flooded.
A full moon. Yesterday, a sheep escaped into the woods,
and not just any sheep—the ram, the whole future.
If we see him again, we’ll see his bones.
The grass shudders a little; maybe the wind passed through it.
And the new leaves of the olives shudder in the same way.
Mice in the fields. Where the fox hunts,
tomorrow there’ll be blood in the grass.
But the storm—the storm will wash it away.
In one window, there’s a boy sitting.
He’s been sent to bed—too early,
in his opinion. So he sits at the window—
Everything is settled now.
Where you are now is where you’ll sleep, where you’ll wake up in the morning.
The mountain stands like a beacon, to remind the night that the earth exists,
that it mustn’t be forgotten.
Above the sea, the clouds form as the wind rises,
dispersing them, giving them a sense of purpose.
Tomorrow the dawn won’t come.
The sky won’t go back to being the sky of day; it will go on as night,
except the stars will fade and vanish as the storm arrives,
lasting perhaps ten hours altogether.
But the world as it was cannot return.
One by one, the lights of the village houses dim
and the mountain shines in the darkness with reflected light.
No sound. Only cats scuffling in the doorways.
They smell the wind: time to make more cats.
Later, they prowl the streets, but the smell of the wind stalks them.
It’s the same in the fields, confused by the smell of blood,
though for now only the wind rises; stars turn the field silver.
This far from the sea and still we know these signs.
The night is an open book.
But the world beyond the night remains a mystery.
SUNSET
At the same time as the sun’s setting,
a farm worker’s burning dead leaves.
It’s nothing, this fire.
It’s a small thing, controlled,
like a family run by a dictator.
Still, when it blazes up, the farm worker disappears;
from the road, he’s invisible.
Compared to the sun, all the fires here
are short-lived, amateurish—
they end when the leaves are gone.
Then the farm worker reappears, raking the ashes.
But the death is real.
As though the sun’s done what it came to do,
made the field grow, then
inspired the burning of earth.
So it can set now.
IN THE CAFÉ
It’s natural to be tired of earth.
When you’ve been dead this long, you’ll probably be tired of heaven.
You do what you can do in a place
but after a while you exhaust that place,
so you long for
rescue.
My friend falls in love a little too easily.
Every year or so a new girl—
If they have children he doesn’t mind;
he can fall in love with children also.
So the rest of us get sour and he stays the same,
full of adventure, always making new discoveries.
But he hates moving, so the women have to come from here, or near here.
Every month or so, we meet for coffee.
In summer, we’ll walk around the meadow, sometimes as far as the mountain.
Even when he suffers, he’s thriving, happy in his body.
It’s partly the women, of course, but not that only.
He moves into their houses, learns to like the movies they like.
It’s not an act—he really does learn,
the way someone goes to cooking school and learns to cook.
He sees everything with their eyes.
He becomes not what they are but what they could be
if they weren’t trapped in their characters.
For him, this new self of his is liberating because it’s invented—
he absorbs the fundamental needs in which their souls are rooted,
he experiences as his own the rituals and preferences these give rise to—
but as he lives with each woman, he inhabits each version of himself
fully, because it isn’t compromised by the normal shame and anxiety.
When he leaves, the women are devastated.
Finally they met a man who answered all their needs—
there was nothing they couldn’t tell him.
When they meet him now, he’s a cipher—
the person they knew doesn’t exist anymore.
He came into existence when they met,
he vanished when it ended, when he walked away.
After a few years, they get over him.
They tell their new boyfriends how amazing it was,
like living with another woman, but without the spite, the envy,
and with a man’s strength, a man’s clarity of mind.
And the men tolerate this, they even smile.
They stroke the women’s hair—
they know this man doesn’t exist; it’s hard for them to feel competitive.
You couldn’t ask, though, for a better friend,
a more subtle observer. When we talk, he’s candid and open,
he’s kept the intensity we all had when we were young.
He talks openly of fear, of the qualities he detests in himself.
And he’s generous—he knows how I am just by looking.
If I’m frustrated or angry, he’ll listen for hours,