Singing Praises for Louise Glück's "Song"

So already, in the first line of her poem "Song,"* Louise Glück talks about beautiful porcelain bowls made by an artisan she is getting to know. The bowls are white and whole, not green and broken and repaired with gold, like the one depicted on the cover of a greeting card I once bought. If anything or anyone in Glück's poetry has been broken, patched up, and enhanced by its own history never denied, it's the poet herself, who is often present in her own poems, including this new one. I love this poem. I'd also like to know why it's called "Song."

First of all, a warning: don't look to Glück's poetry to offer healing in the form of golden balms and salves to be applied to wounds that we humans typically experience--and that we often inflict on ourselves, intentionally or unintentionally. Rather, the gold that gleams in Glück's poems illuminates, sometimes harshly.  

"Nunnery" by Scott Ketcham

Glück is neither markedly cruel nor particularly compassionate as she compels us--and herself--to see. Candid, thoughtful, intent on not fooling herself, she's a Virgil figure who walks in darkness beside us, her Dante-like readers who may have been wounded, may be questioning the "truths" that have guided us, may have experienced or be experiencing hell--or the threat of it.** Minimally, we want to survive. Ideally, we want to be and feel truly alive during what remains of our lives. Yes, Louise Glück is very concerned about mortality, as are many of her older readers.

Compared to many of Glück's poems, "Song" is gentle and bright, though equally focused on the challenge of being truly alive. I believe it's a pandemic poem, since in the first stanza, the speaker immediately identifies the problem of getting material objects to someone else when humans are separated by distance that must be maintained:

Leo Cruz makes the most beautiful white bowls;
I think I must get some to you
but how is the question
in these times

"Aquatint 3" by Sylvia Plimack Mangold***

The theme of limiting separation, probably pandemic-caused, continues in the second stanza, in which the grasses**** about which Leo Cruz is teaching the speaker can, at the moment, only be seen in a book:

 

He is teaching me
the names of the 

     desert grasses;
I have a book
since to see the 

    grasses is impossible

In the next two stanzas, when the speaker contradicts a viewpoint Leo asserts, he asks that she leave the door open to the possibility that he's right:

Leo thinks the things man makes
are more beautiful
than what exists in nature

and I say no.
And Leo says
wait and see.

Human-made things as more beautiful than what occurs in nature? Talk about an assertion that could get an artisan kicked out of a lot of gatherings of those who consider beauty and nature synonymous.

"Edged Sod" by Scott Ketcham****

But that's the kind of thing Glück routinely does: forces her readers to reconsider opinions and interpretations that may have solidified into truths and beliefs. Many of us know the Greek myth about Hades' abduction of Persephone to the Underworld, where, according to the deal that her mother Demeter and Hades strike, she must live for half of every year. And many of us have been taught to view it as a tragic tale of mother-daughter grief and longing. But Glück's poem "Persephone the Wanderer" asks us to consider another way that Persephone might feel about Demeter: 

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter. (18)*****

Dark, direct stuff indeed, this characterization of this mother-daughter relationship, maybe any mother-daughter relationship. Glück's poems often explore the "other interpretations" of Greek myths; I chose this particular one because the COVID-19 pandemic has, to some degree, relegated all of us to a kind of bounded underworld existence, a chronic exile from the experience of being fully and freely alive.

So back to "Song"--and another way it challenges the expectations of longtime Glück readers. Though Glück assumes the Virgil role in many of her poems, Leo Cruz is clearly the teacher and guide in this one. Yet again, in the fifth stanza, she takes her cues from him, and learns fast, without self-reproach. 

We make plans

to walk the trails 

    together.******

When, I ask him,

when? Never again:

that is what we do 

    not say.

Ever looking beyond the present to enlivening, intense experience, wanting to plan for it, the speaker pushes to know "when"--the poem uses the word twice to underscore her impatient hunger. Quickly she learns not to ask again, though we're not sure precisely how. 

Then, in the sixth through eighth stanzas, she tells what else Leo is teaching her:

He is teaching me
to live in imagination:

a cold wind
blows as I cross the desert;
I can see his house in the distance;
smoke is coming from the chimney

That is the kiln, I think;
only Leo makes porcelain in the desert

It's the colon after "imagination" that clues us in: in her mind's eye, the speaker walks across the desert, crossing the distance between her and the bowl-maker defined by and immersed in his craft that yields those beautiful white bowls. 

She must have shared this vision with Leo, because in the ninth stanza, just one line long, he responds, perhaps a little patronizingly, perhaps just observationally, 

Ah, he says, you are dreaming again

--as if to remind her of her propensity to yearn for what's beyond the present moment.

Finally, in the poem's tenth and final stanza, she asserts herself, claims for herself the right to dream, to imagine beyond the present: 

And I say then I’m glad I dream
the fire is still alive

To discover that the fire within is still alive: what isn't to sing about? And isn't that what we all want during this pandemic--the confirmation that despite our too-frequent feelings of being hemmed in, sealed off, mired in loss and despair, we haven't lost our capacities to feel alive, to hope, and to imagine the future?

I suspect that Louise Glück entitled this poem "Song" not just because of her gratitude for Leo's friendship and different way of being in the world, but for the opportunity their relationship gave her to reclaim and assert the power of dreaming in her own life. We're not required to become the people whose lives we learn from.

Still, questions remain for me. Did Leo know that the speaker feared that her inner fire had been extinguished by the pandemic, or something else? Is to dream different than to "live in imagination"? Does dreaming lead to imagining, and/or vice versa? And is a poem a song because someone says it is? Now, for the first time, I find myself asking one more question: is Leo Cruz real or imagined?

I still love this poem--the relationship central to it; its stunning images of perfect white bowls, desert grasses, the house in the desert with smoke rising from its chimney; the challenge it presents of learning to live both at a distance and in the moment; the assertion of warmth and life at its end. But I'm still baffled by its title.

I do have a final thought, though, one based on what Glück says in one section of "October," the first poem in Averno*******:

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful. . . .

They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish. 

 

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly

in anticipation of silence.

The ear gets used to them. (11)********

To my ear, Louise Glück is singing a new song in "Song." Desolation and anguish are not reigning as she responds to Leo Cruz, whether he's real or imagined. She's alive and pressing on. I needed that.

* You can also read this poem in the October 19, 2020 print edition of The New Yorker. 

** "Nunnery" by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/180670325537 

*** "Aquatint 3" by Sylvia Plimack Mangold: http://www.parasolpress.com/parasol-editions/mangold_sylvia/Mangold_Sylvia_Plimack_Aquatint3.html

**** Edged Sod" by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/185237119582

***** Glück Louise. (2006). "Persephone the Wanderer". In Averno (pp. 16-19). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

******  Burt, S. (2012, January 25). Day of Oz [web log]. https://sdburtonlife.wordpress.com/page/4/.  

******* Book images embedded in Harris, E. A. (2020, October 8). Here Are Some Memorable Lines from Louise Glück. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-poems.html. 

******** Glück Louise. (2006). "October". In Averno (pp. 5-15). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

What I Washed, And What I Washed For

Worse Than Mine, But You Get It

So already, I'd put it off for far too long. And then came the moment truth a couple of weeks ago: as I walked into my living room around sunrise one morning, I wondered if the beige tint of the morning fog had something to do with the California wildfires--and then realized I was seeing a pale, clear fog-free sky through the greasy film on the upper half of my double hung windows. I knew then I really had to do something about my dirty windows before late fall's colder temperatures made me dread the job of washing them even more.

I'd meant to wash my windows last spring, and then came the coronavirus pandemic with all its claims on attention and purpose. By the time summer's high temperatures arrived and settled in, the wise course was to keep the shades lower and wait for the days of fewer insects, dissipated road dust, and less pollen.

But I'd had my moment of reckoning, and ragweed* season was over; it was time to do the job. I was tired of literally seeing through a glass, darkly. Now I was resolved.

I started off by listening to weather forecasts. As one who loves October's bright blue weather, I'd been disappointed by the month's summer-like warmth, but I now saw an opportunity in its peculiar mildness, a method to its seasonal madness. And so I chose a blue-gray morning on a Tuesday predicted to have temperatures that would top out in the middle sixties.

Realtor Raymond Chan's Courtyard Photo

Though I have only five windows in total, I knew I had a big job ahead of me, so I set aside a full morning for it. I live in an old factory building that became condominiums in 1987, and my windows are no longer young. They often stick when they should slide, and slide when they should stick. Parts of them swing out for cleaning, and because my space is small, washing them requires the movement of furniture and objects. 

My plan was to finish one window before moving on to the next, and to remove the screens as well as the storm windows for cleaning. I'd cleaned my storm windows before, but I'd never taken on my screens. If I put each one in my husband's shower and saturated it with Clorox Cleaner + Bleach, I surmised, the accumulated grunge would start to loosen its grip while I cleaned the storm windows in the other room. Then, with some energetic scrubbing and rinsing, I'd banish the enemy handily.

And so I began. And as I was doing the first window, I realized that I'd never be done by lunchtime. First of all, when the screen's rinse water ran charcoal gray, I knew I'd better spray, scrub, and rinse each screen twice before returning it to the window; I just couldn't let the pummeling rains of the next nor'easter pass through those screens to splatter my newly-washed windows with greasy old schmutz. Second of all, given that I'd already cleared them, it only made sense to wash my grimy, pollen-covered windowsills as well--and what was the point of doing that if I didn't also wash those removed objects on which pollen and grime had also accumulated? Finally, since I'd gone to the trouble of moving furniture, it only made sense to vacuum those now-revealed hard-to-reach corners.

I also have to confess that by the time I finished bending and stretching to clean that third screen, I also knew that I was using some muscles I wasn't in the habit of using: I told myself I needed to be careful, take my time, do but not overdo. This was going to be an all-day job.

And I was fine with that realization; as a matter of fact, in that moment, I felt sure that I was doing "what really mattered"--and there have been many days during the pandemic when I wasn't sure at all what really mattered. 

Suddenly, I realized where and how I was standing. My back was turned to the television screen, but I could hear the familiar voices of several journalists with whom I've been surviving the months of the pandemic and the presidential campaign. My front was turned toward the window I was sometimes wiping, sometimes rubbing, sometimes wrestling with to make sure its various parts were replaced in the frame as they should be.

Yes, there I was, standing between my two windows onto the world: the living room window through which, especially during these days of sheltering at home, I watch the sky, the trees, the weather, the people walking by or hauling groceries from their car--the world beyond my apartment walls that's often so sweetly, seasonally, mundanely normal (even if the people are all masked); and the television screen, my virtual window onto the wider world that often helps me at least partially understand what has happened, is happening, and might happen in this complex, crazy, sometimes depressing, sometimes uplifting world of ours.

You could say that (or better yet, I could say that) I was washing my windows out of love--love for the world, love for my neighbors and the people in my life who are also trying to go about their lives as normally as possible when nothing's normal--and who are also much relegated to experiencing the world through their own windows and screens, love for myself and my sense of what I need to keep moving forward with some optimism.

Wow! I surprised myself with those thoughts of love. But not as much as I would have a year ago. Once I'd had them and expressed them to myself, there was nothing to do except make some lunch to fortify myself for an afternoon of more window-washing. Peanut butter, a good apple, a sense of purpose and productiveness, virtual companionship, the feeling part of being "something bigger than me," and time: what more did I need for it to be a good day?

And good days can be few and far between these days. Even before I pledged to wash my windows, I had already been thinking about this fall's strange sadness, wondering how it might amplify the stress and disorientation so many are feeling. When Eastern Standard Time begins the day after Hallowe'en, so too will the time of shorter afternoons and colder temperatures, this year without the cheerful prospect of gathering with lots of friends and family members around food-heaped Thanksgiving tables, in front of sparkling Christmas trees and lit menorahs, before blazing fireplaces. For sure, "home for the holidays" won't mean the same thing this year. It's a loss for sure. But I suspect our imaginations will triumph, as will our wills to connect and celebrate.

The months ahead promise more time spent alone or apart, thus more time spent observing the world through windows and on screens. So if we can make our homes places we love being, at least most of the time, we owe that to ourselves. As for me personally, I seldom mind being at home for long stretches if I can look out of my windows onto the world, or some world. Wherever I manage to get my "views beyond," they always give me hope: there is light out there. Somewhere. Always.

* Photo included in Nature's Wonders. (2015, October 16). Hay Fever? Don't Blame Goldenrod! [web log]. http://mothernature2014.blogspot.com/2015/10/hay-fever-dont-blame-goldenrod.html.

After Yom Kippur: Away from the Field and Onto the Road

So already, this past weekend, my husband Scott and I were back at our cabin located just west of Williamstown over the New York state border. Our task was to winterize it, but we had plenty of time for sitting and looking at the field in front of it. Sitting there, I realized how much I love looking at the vegetation in and around the field through the lower leaf-bare branches of the wild apple trees sprinkled at intervals along the path around it.

I didn't always feel this way. I used to ask Scott periodically why those trees didn't slough off those branches that had apparently been rendered fruitless, leafless, and "dead" by the sunlight's inability to penetrate the canopies of leafy, spreading branches above them. But now, I've grown attached to looking through the lacy scrims formed by their bare, tangled branches. Especially in the fall, to see orange, yellow, and red vegetation through their low-slung dark branches is like having a "burning bush" experience.

But the truth is that the Berkshire-Taconic region abounds in burning bushes in autumn--in splashes of intense color announcing themselves on muted hillsides, along trampled footpaths, among branches hung with dry, brown leaves waiting to fall at the wind's next shudder. And this matters because this is a blog post about seeing or hearing--or not--what's there, especially what's probably been there all along--which almost always is more about the person than about the thing they* are perceiving or not perceiving.

Today, two days after the last of the Jewish High Holy Days, I write to say that I had a good Yom Kippur. Historically, Yom Kippur has washed me up baffled on the shore. This year, though,  something clicked. This year, as the holiday concluded, I felt a combination of lightness, seriousness, and renewal that was new to me. I attribute this to four things: written words, read at the field, that finally penetrated my heart and mind, four requests to pray, a COVID-19 silver lining, and a solo trio.

Written Words, Read at the Field, That Finally Penetrated. As those of you who've read my blog before know by now, I've read Rabbi Alan Lew's This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation ** each year for the last few years as I've tried to prepare for the holidays. So why was this the first year the following sentences penetrated my consciousness?

•  "It is still the case that in order for Yom Kippur to effect atonement for us, we have to find a way from unconsciousness to consciousness; we have to become aware of our moral and spiritual condition; we have to become aware that we are not operating in a spiritual vacuum--that there is, in fact, a transcendent consciousness out there watching us with unbearabe compassion as we blunder through the world" (12).
  
• "What our tradition is affirming is that when we reach the point of awareness, everything in time--everything in the  year, everything in our life--conspires to help us. Everything  becomes the instrument of our redemption" (29).
• "The day of Yom Kippur itself atones. The journey through time which surrounds it heals. If you open yourself to them, these Holy Days carry you home" (34).

I think the field is what helped me open myself to the idea of a gentler, warmer God. As my blog post of September 23 explains, as I walked the path around the field seeing the cabin and field anew, recognizing that the path and the field really were one since Scott had carved the path from the field, I began to understand that doing teshuva could just as easily be like walking a gentle, undulating path as struggling to climb a steep, unforgiving trail. To paraphrase the words of the traditional Irish blessing, I could feel the road rising up to meet me as I walked the perimeter of that field again and again.

Over the last seven years, I've been serious about preparing for the Days of Awe, earnest about doing teshuva--often defined as turning toward God, returning to God, or trying to get closer to the divine within and/or beyond oneself. I've read; reflected; identified what aspects of myself I needed to change, what fences I needed to mend, what steps I needed to take to overcome my "old" ways.

I now see that in those years, I was too "good" at holding that mirror up to myself--and too apt to see my reflection through the lens of my own assumptions. From my point of view, for whatever reason, judgment and compassion did not, could not walk hand-in-hand; judgment was, to my mind, at best unfeeling and at worst joyfully punitive. So the notion of a compassionate God wanting me to be my best self but also longing for my return--so much so that if I didn't try to return until the waning hours of Yom Kippur, I would still be joyfully welcomed and forgiven--was something my reading alone couldn't make real for me. 

 

Equally importantly, my tendency to "go it alone spiritually" teamed up with my critical gaze into the mirror to predispose me not to see the people around me who were also doing teshuva. 

 

This year, suddenly--or maybe not so suddenly--the world, even the world of atonement, became a kinder, gentler place. And not just a place inhabited solely by harshly self-scrutinizing me. 

Four Requests to Pray. I've never been much good at praying.*** But even so, four people (who probably didn't know that!) recently asked me to pray for them. One asked for prayers for a child, one for prayers for a sibling, and one for prayers for herself. Another, as you may know from reading my last blog, asked me to offer at the field a prayer that she had composed--and in which she spoke directly to God on behalf of all of us. 

 

Feeling honored and tasked, I knew I had to step up my praying game: if I had anything to do with it, all those asking me to pray for them were going to be inscribed for a good new year, whatever that might mean. I was fortunate that all four asked: they pulled me away from my mirror and set me to walking arm-in-arm with others feeling dread and hope. I worry wordlessly about certain people all the time, but these four people got me to step up and speak to God. I needed to do that.

A COVID-19 Silver Lining. For years, I've gone to synagogue on Yom Kippur, standing amidst the crowded assembly saying multiple times the prayers and confessions specific to the holiday, and sometimes speaking in my own words during the times of private meditation. But this year, the experience was different because, courtesy of the coronavirus, most of my synagogue's congregation was attending services on Zoom while a core group in the synagogue carried out those parts of the service that involved the Torah and the Ark in which its kept. 

In other years, I had understood all of us as atoning separately while we stood together; but this year--perhaps because we were more a prayer diaspora than a physical congregation and because I'd recently read an article about how individuals are held up and supported by the group as they each stand in awe of the power of the day--I was struck by how much we were striving to worship as a group because we could not gather together. 

Yes, there were the funny moments--like when those of us at home stood before the open ark, our webcams reducing us to midriffs and open prayer books. But mostly the experience was tender and earnest. Never before had I been so aware of the drama of the liturgy--the way it's written to pull all of those present into the intense immediacy of the moment--the irony being that so many of us were physically absent this year. As the My Jewish Learning web site explains about the prayer "Hineni"--the word means "Here I am--

"Rather, when the chazzan [either a cantor or another prayer leader, who may not be the rabbi] states 'Hineni,' it is in fact everyone present who are all saying the same thing, despite the prayer’s singular phrasing. We are here. It is we who are impoverished in spirit and deed, and we all share in the fear that our bad choices over the last year might be weighed against us. Nevertheless, we stand humble and ready for the difficult work of teshuvah (repentance) that lies ahead."****

When the prayer leader said, "Here I am," I laughed momentarily and thought, "Yes, there you are." But then I was all in.

 

Other Yom Kippur prayers also bring God and the congregation "before" each other and center on formalized highly dramatic dialogue--and again I felt keenly aware that we were not standing together. In Kol Nidrei, the leader speaks Moses' words that ask God for forgiveness for the gathered and errant Israelites of all generations, and the leader and congregation together speak the words of God: "ADONAI replied, 'I have forgiven, as you have asked (205).'"*****

 

The irony for me: during this good-as-we-could-do virtual collective prayer experience, I felt more part of an atoning congregation than I had during other Yom Kippurs when I had physically stood among other congregants in various synagogues. And at the same time, I suspect all of us Zoom attendees were already pining for next year's holiday when we might again gather together physically in the synagogue. Were it not for COVID-19, I suspect I would not have felt this same sense of urgency and connection--as well as this hopeful anticipation of Yom Kippur 2021. 

 

A Solo Trio. But in truth, redemption, forgiveness, community, compassion, solace, healing, and the power of groups haven't been on my mind only for the last few months. They've  been much on my mind all year because of the intense positive experience I and my fellow singers had last winter and spring of preparing to sing Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard. Of course, all of us were heartbroken when the coronavirus forced the combined Unicorn Singers and the Broad Cove Chorale to postpone our performances indefinitely. But I also felt that our shared experience of preparing for the performance had fortified and unified us, making it both sadder and easier for us to deal with the disappointment of not being able to perform it. The ideas at the center of that piece stayed with me as the pandemic extended across the months, challenging all of us to stay separate and stand together.

 

It's our nature to move on from life's peaks and valleys until we're reminded of them again--as I was in early September when I became aware of a virtual performance of "All of Us," the next-to-last movement of CMH, sung by members of 45 choirs whose spring CMH performances had also not happened.

 

A solo female trio sings above the chorus in this piece, and I was one of the trio in my choral group's non-performance of this piece. Of course I watched and listened to this massive virtual performance, all the time remembering those words I'd internalized months ago about the power and poignancy of "all of us" asking together how to begin, to forgive, to be forgiven; about the "Love that dwells" and "burns In every human heart." Such words can't sung again and again and again without their becoming part of their singers' hearts. 

 

So how does this "all of us" idea relate to my Yom Kippur? The answer is simple--and big: this was the first Yom Kippur that I didn't ask for my forgiveness and my inscription in the Book of Life--rather, I asked for all of us to be forgiven and inscribed. When I realized I had done that, I felt like I might float!

 

Though Yom Kippur was two weeks ago, it's still much on my mind. In fact, as I'm setting out on the post-high holiday road, I am keeping in mind two pieces of Yom Kippur advice from my rabbi that have given me a way to envision the road ahead and begin to walk down it:

• Talking about the importance of the "discipline of love," Rabbi Daniel Klein asked each of us to hold in our minds for a full minute the image of one person whom we struggled to love; afterwards, he asked us to commit to taking a loving stance toward this person during the upcoming year, during which they would likely continue to aggravate and anger us.
• Talking about the need for each of us to identify some area of our lives that we needed to change, Rabbi Klein advised against our keeping that flaw front and center in our consciousness. Yes, we needed to keep it where we could see it, but we also needed to avoid defining ourselves by it: to focus exclusively on it could lead to self-loathing, which seldom motivates change.
  

On my birthday three days later, at the Governor Oliver Ames Estate in Easton, I spent some time looking at a bridge leading from the estate to an adjacent private property. Edging the road atop it were low brick and granite-capped walls through which the water flowing below could be seen. For me, those parallel walls represented the problem person and  problem area that the rabbi had advised keeping in sight without letting them block my view of the road down which I needed to be heading.

If you look closely, you'll notice there's a house barely visible through the branches of the trees to the right of the bridge. It's a grand house, and there's not a leafless lower branch to be seen on any of trees near it--a very different place than our spot over the New York border. 

 

However and wherever a burning bush burns gold, I'll always love viewing it through some wild apple tree's lattice of lower bare branches. Meanwhile, it may be many months before I see the field again. But the road ahead will lead back there--that I know for sure.

* I am using the pronoun "their" deliberately, in order to be gender-inclusive. So, no, this is not a pronoun number-agreement error on my part.

** Lew, A. (2018). This is real and you are completely unprepared: The Days of Awe as a journey of transformation. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company.

*** I'm coming to a better understanding of why, thanks to a Hebrew College adult education course I'm taking about prayer. Perhaps in a future blog post, I'll explain. 

**** Axelrod, C. M. Hineni: A Prayer for the Ability to Pray. My Jewish Learning. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hineni-a-prayer-for-the-ability-to-pray/. 

***** Milstein, Irma, and Paul Milstein. Maḥzor Lev Shalem: for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Rabbinical Assembly, 2010.