Cased in Clean Bark You Drift

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.

-Louis Gluck, "The Undertaking"

It was only a matter of time before I began invoking poetry into these posts. Hence, a new blog category. It was only a matter of time before I began invoking Louise Gluck. I am told she is the most popular poet among New Yorker magazine readers, young and old. Hmm... The excerpt in my last post was published recently in the New Yorker; "The Undertaking" is from her collection The House on Marshland, published in 1975. Her later poems are very much death/mortality-focused, (emotionally) spare to the point of near-desolation (it is the "near" that is significant here...). The above is brimming with the warm hope of a woman 30 years less worn, less lived.

Autumn is in the air here in the farm lands. It was chilly last night, and windy. Today, the chill remains. The second crop of cool-weather greens is starting to sprout (lettuce, spinach, snap peas). The tomatoes and squash are struggling to turn color. J. has gone fishin', I am here with my words.

Autumn and Louise Gluck - they go together for me. Perhaps because the first poem of hers which struck me, from her recent collection Averno, is called "October." These are the lines that somehow stopped me in my tracks:

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

Something about the artist's deep sense of uselessness, of ultimate incompetence, at the end of the day, amidst all the world's troubles. And yet, wanting to be useful, seeking those tiny opportunities, to make offerings. And now/all fear gives way... It's not much, it's not much. But it's something.