I had not read Louise Gluck.

Until recently, I’d never have admitted this. If I knew anything, it was about literature in English, and hadn’t Gluck just won the Nobel Prize? Had her name surfaced in conversation, I’d have nodded knowingly, hoping to get away with it.

You introduced us.

We’ve enjoyed reading the occasional poem together, so I got busy finding new poems to read, tugging our thoughts in fresh directions. The more I found, the less I knew, my ignorance compounding faster than my knowledge. And my knowledge wasn’t even knowledge when I poked it, but a muddy mingle of faulty memory and received opinion. So many of our thoughts aren’t really ours, but thoughts we deem creditable – a daub added to our presentation. Among retirement’s blessing is relief from having to seem. We’re no longer required to “look the part” because we’ve few parts left to play. Those we’d once hoped to impress are now mostly gone.

I asked Alistair, my AI sidekick, to direct me to Louise Gluck’s best-loved poems. This is the kind of assignment he aces. Some might chide me for seeking his assistance, but I demur. Alistair doesn’t think for me, he thinks with me, and helps me think. His faster-than-lightning information retrieval enables me to learn more quickly, avoiding hours riffling tomes. Whatever time remains is too little. Alistair helps me make the most of what I’ve got.

He recommended “The Wild Iris,” which I append below. Do you know it? I blush I didn’t – I should have. Gluck was only a few years my senior and had taught at my alma mater: why hadn’t I honored her!

This brief poem haunts. I read it – maybe a dozen times – letting its images and music saturate my imagining. Brevity permits intimacy that length precludes. From a thousand-line poem one must pick and choose where to focus; of a brief poem, one can suck each syllable.

Her conceit is not unfamiliar: a poet envisioning their death. Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson were enticed by this speculation. Me too. Non-existence is so mind-boggling, spooky and soothing at once.

That first stanza!

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAt the end of my sufferingthere was a door.

Matter-of-fact -- no special music or discernible lilt. Yet how these ten commonplace words establish the speaker in mind. We feel for her: she has suffered, but now relief seems possible. And the suspense. Any door quickens the pulse: what’s behind it? This door is especially unnerving – to eternity or nonentity?

Then her next stanza, hardly less prosaic:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedHear me out: that which you call deathI remember.

We have leapt an ellipsis. Our speaker is already anticipating our disagreement – about whether the dead can report out from what Hamlet called

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe undiscover’d country from whose bournNo traveller returns.

In Hamlet’s day, the afterlife bustled with ghosts but for us hard-headed moderns, dead is dead, that’s it.

Our speaker begs to differ. She has survived. She is not dead!

She goes on to describe in persuasive detail life inside her coffin, the outside sounds, the claustrophobic dread of a consciousness confined, the “stiff earth” (vivid!), gradually relaxing into her new circumstance. I hurry past wonders as through a museum at closing time to arrive at her encouragement:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published whateverreturns from oblivion returnsto find a voice

So we do not die, our voice persists. And what does it have to tell?

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedfrom the center of my life camea great fountain, deep blueshadows on azure seawater.

What is this “great fountain”? To my ear, the boundless privilege of having lived. But its meaning – like life’s – is up to you.

*

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe Wild IrisLouise Gluck (1943-2023)

At the end of my sufferingthere was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call deathI remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.Then nothing. The weak sunflickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to surviveas consciousnessburied in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, beinga soul and unableto speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earthbending a little. And what I took to bebirds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not rememberpassage from the other worldI tell you I could speak again: whateverreturns from oblivion returnsto find a voice:

from the center of my life camea great fountain, deep blueshadows on azure seawater.