… gets the Lit Nobel. I’ll look at one of her poems after my Instacart shopper and I conclude our brief affair.
And put an umlaut over her U, dammit.
**********************
Since Halloween is close, here’s “All Hallows.”
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
****************
So Glück writes brief lyrics in the key of longing. She’d prefer a world infused with religious spirit (one where cinquefoil is not merely a plant but – remember? – a common decorative motif in churches), but will take, with a sigh, the secular modern one she was handed. All Hallows is typical of this attitude, evoking an all-hollowed-out landscape – but hollowed almost in a gesture of propitiation: I’ve assembled a pure world of new possibility for you, oh hallowed ones: Come!
Or: Once you see precisely how nakedly dispirited this world is, you’re going to be compelled to respiritualize it!
And one of the saints does: a soul creeps out of a tree — ready, with the turn of the season, to respond to the imminent reseeding of the world.
The farmer in other words stages the landscape in order (holding treats in her hand) to coax the dubious soul-kitten out of the tree.
It’s all very Veni Creator Spiritus, in other words. If you’d prefer a more… ample version of this come-hither, go here.