Poem post: "Telescope" by Louise Glück

[radiantfracture]

In writing group tonight, some beautiful poem prompts, including this, by the only just lost Louise Glück. She is almost still here.


Telescope
Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

* * * * * *

I love moments of displacement and disorientation, though this one contains a lot of grief.

I like how mortality is here as the shadow of the eternal rather than evoked directly. I can feel the precise cold of this night, the clarity of the sky. I have looked through this telescope.

I like the refining of the thought as the poet goes on, in the way of Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Hass -- "not that the image is false / but the relation is false." I would not have said that, would have stayed with the illusion of transcendence, clung to it. Glück is brave to put it away so neatly with the telescope.

{rf}

Comments

[sabotabby]

This was a thing I had to read right now for completely unrelated reasons, so thank you!

[radiantfracture]

Personal, philosophical, or professional, or all three?

[sabotabby]

Vibes-wise, for the bit that I'm writing.

[pantherinsnow]

Yes. Particularly that last note--it's that specific turn of thought that reminds me these are not my own thoughts, but someone else's lens. Which, well, that certainly goes to the heart of the poem, too. The poet makes her choices, we each make our own.

Robert Hass was a gateway for me. He changed how I wrote. And through researching his influences I found Rexroth, and that was it for me. I resonated like a tuning fork.

[radiantfracture]

Which, well, that certainly goes to the heart of the poem, too

Ah! That's a good point.

Robert Hass was a gateway for me. He changed how I wrote.

Me too, I hope. For me it was listening to him read "Faint Music." I used the ending of that as an epigraph to one of my poems. I don't remember which of my poems now but I still remember his --

I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.