On Louise Glück

I WAS LYING in bed late at night, woeful, confused by another death, this one the death of a close friend; the losses had been mounting steadily, a bewildering number of losses, each one specific, difficult to accept, hard to overcome, and I must have dozed off because I heard a voice, or thought I heard a voice, saying: “At the end of my suffering there was a door.” I listened for it again and realized that it had paused in the middle of a sentence:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

It was as if someone was speaking from the other side: “Hear me out: that which you call death / I remember.” This was not possible, I understood that, or almost did, I was still only half-awake, but now I intentionally tried to recall what I had overheard: “It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth.” Then it was over, I forced myself awake, it was too eerie and unnatural, and I realized that I was not hearing a friend speak but recalling a poem by Louise Glück, the title poem of The Wild Iris, which I had read and reread in 1992, the year it came out. The voice that came to me was the testimony of a wild iris, or, more precisely, the voice of a poet brazenly speaking as a perennial, and it was so convincing that it startled me awake, as if she really did recollect the passage from another world and had come back to tell us what it was like, to give evidence, pay witness.

Glück herself has said that the image of the door at the end of suffering had been with her for a long time before she found a place for it. It was a strange gift at the beginning of a two-year dry spell, a long period of barrenness and unproductivity. And then a door opened, a barrier gave way, and came to her, almost as dictation, and she