گذشته و پنج شعر دیگر از لوییز گلیک

The Past  / ۲۰۱۴

Louise Glück – 1943-

Small light in the sky appearing

suddenly between

two pine boughs, their fine needles

now etched onto the radiant surface

and above this

high, feathery heaven—

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,

most intense when the wind blows through it

and the sound it makes equally strange,

like the sound of the wind in a movie—

Shadows moving. The ropes

making the sound they make. What you hear now

will be the sound of the nightingale, Chordata,

the male bird courting the female—

The ropes shift. The hammock

sways in the wind, tied

firmly between two pine trees.

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine.

It is my mother’s voice you hear

or is it only the sound the trees make

when the air passes through them

because what sound would it make,

passing through nothing?

The Myth of Innocence  // ۲۰۰۶

Louise Glück – 1943-

One summer she goes into the field as usual

stopping for a bit at the pool where she often

looks at herself, to see

if she detects any changes. She sees

the same person, the horrible mantle

of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.

That’s my uncle spying again, she thinks—

everything in nature is in some way her relative.

I am never alone, she thinks,

turning the thought into a prayer.

Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore

how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.

Also that he embraced her, right there,

with her uncle watching. She remembers

sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.

Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,

the chilling insight that from this moment

she couldn’t live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool

will never return. A woman will return,

looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,

I was abducted, but it sounds

wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.

Then she says, I was not abducted.

Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted

to escape my body. Even, sometimes,

I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance

wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—

she says them in rotation.

Death, husband, god, stranger.

Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.

I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can’t remember herself as that person

but she keeps thinking the pool will remember

and explain to her the meaning of her prayer

so she can understand

whether it was answered or not.

The Night Migrations // 2006

Louise Glück – 1943-

This is the moment when you see again

the red berries of the mountain ash

and in the dark sky

the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think

the dead won’t see them—

these things we depend on,

they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?

I tell myself maybe it won’t need

these pleasures anymore;

maybe just not being is simply enough,

hard as that is to imagine.

Sunset

At the same time as the sun’s setting,

a farm worker’s burning dead leaves.

It’s nothing, this fire.

It’s a small thing, controlled,

like a family run by a dictator.

Still, when it blazes up, the farm worker disappears;

from the road, he’s invisible.

Compared to the sun, all the fires here

are short-lived, amateurish—

they end when the leaves are gone.

Then the farm worker reappears, raking the ashes.

But the death is real.

As though the sun’s done what it came to do,

made the field grow, then

inspired the burning of earth.

So it can set now.

from A Village Life

First Snow

Like a child, the earth’s going to sleep,

or so the story goes.

But I’m not tired, it says.

And the mother says, You may not be tired but I’m tired—

You can see it in her face, everyone can.

So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come.

Because the mother’s sick to death of her life

and needs silence.

from A Village Life