A SUMMER GARDEN (Excerpt)
by Louise Glück
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 . . .
MORE: To read “A Summer Garden” by Louise Glück in its entirety, visit poetryfoundation.org.
PHOTO: Vintage photograph of a woman with a dog, available at ebay.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Louise Glück was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently, Poems 1962-2012 (2012), A Village Life: Poems (2009), Averno (2006), The Seven Ages (2001), and Vita Nova (1999), winner of Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize and The New Yorker‘s Book Award in Poetry. In 2004, Sarabande Books released her six-part poem “October” as a chapbook. Her other books include Meadowlands (1996), The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992) — winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award — Ararat (1990), for which she received the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award. In 2008, Glück was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. Her most recent collection, Poems 1962-2012, was awarded the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a writer-in-residence at Yale University.
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