A Village Life by Louise Glück

Author:Louise Glück
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781466875630
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A NIGHT IN SPRING

They told her she came out of a hole in her mother

but really it’s impossible to believe

something so delicate could come out of something

so fat—her mother naked

looks like a pig. She wants to think

the children telling her were making fun of her ignorance;

they think they can tell her anything

because she doesn’t come from the country, where people know these things.

She wants the subject to be finished, dead. It troubles her

to picture this space in her mother’s body,

releasing human beings now and again,

first hiding them, then dropping them into the world,

and all along drugging them, inspiring the same feelings

she attaches to her bed, this sense of solitude, this calm,

this sense of being unique—

Maybe her mother still has these feelings.

This could explain why she never sees

the great differences between the two of them

because at one point they were the same person—

She sees her face in the mirror, the small nose

sunk in fat, and at the same time she hears

the children’s laughter as they tell her

it doesn’t start in the face, stupid,

it starts in the body—

At night in bed, she pulls the quilt as high as possible,

up to her neck—

She has found this thing, a self,

and come to cherish it,

and now it will be packed away in flesh and lost—

And she feels her mother did this to her, meant this to happen.

Because whatever she may try to do with her mind,

her body will disobey,

that its complacency, its finality, will make her mind invisible,

no one will see—

Very gently, she moves the sheet aside.

And under it, there is her body, still beautiful and new

with no marks anywhere. And it seems to her still

identical to her mind, so consistent with it as to seem

transparent, almost,

and once again

she falls in love with it and vows to protect it.

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