Louise Glück

Today’s poet is Louise Glück. I had the pleasure of hearing Glück read her poetry at SUNY Stony Brook in 2003.

August

My sister painted her nails fuchsia,
a color named after a fruit.
All the colors were named after foods:
coffee frost, tangerine sherbet.
We sat in the backyard, waiting for our lives to resume
the ascent summer interrupted:
triumphs, victories, for which school
was a kind of practice.
The teachers smiled down at us, pinning on the blue ribbons.
And in our heads, we smiled down at the teachers.
Our lives were stored in our heads.
They hadn't begun; we were both sure
we'd know when they did.
They certainly weren't this.
We sat in the backyard, watching our bodies change:
first bright pink, then tan.
I dribbled baby oil on my legs, my sister
rubbed polish remover on her left hand,
tried another color.
We read, we listened to the portable radio.
Obviously this wasn't life, this sitting around
in colored lawn chairs.
Nothing matched up to the dreams.
My sister kept trying to find a color she liked:
it was summer, they were all frosted.
Fuchsia, orange, mother-of-pearl.
She held her left hand in front of her eyes,
moved it from side to side.
Why was it always like this
the colors so intense in the glass bottles,
so distinct, and on the hand
almost exactly alike,
a film of weak silver. .
My sister shook the bottle. The orange
kept sinking to the bottom; maybe
that was the problem.
She shook it over and over, held it up to the light,
studied the words in the magazine.
The world was a detail, a small thing not yet
exactly right. Or like an afterthought, somehow
still crude or approximate.
What was real was the idea:
My sister added a coat, held her thumb
to the side of the bottle.
We kept thinking we would see
the gap narrow, though in fact it persisted.
The more stubbornly it persisted,
the more fiercely we believed.

Read Radium by Glück at:
www.findarticles.com

Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up
on Long Island. She is the author of numerous books of poetry,
including The Seven Ages (Ecco Press, 2001); Vita Nova
(1999), winner of Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry
Prize; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which
received the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of
America's William Carlos Williams Award; Ararat (1990),
for which she received the 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. She has also published
a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry
(1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award
for Nonfiction. Her other honors include the Bollingen Prize
in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and
fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations,
and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Louise Glück
teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor
of The Academy of American Poets. In the fall of 2003,
Glück assumed her duties as the Library of Congress's
twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.