Averno by Louise Glück

Author:Louise Glück
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781466875593
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

3.

In late autumn a young girl set fire to a field

of wheat. The autumn

had been very dry; the field

went up like tinder.

Afterward there was nothing left.

You walk through it, you see nothing.

There’s nothing to pick up, to smell.

The horses don’t understand it—

Where is the field, they seem to say.

The way you and I would say

where is home.

No one knows how to answer them.

There is nothing left;

you have to hope, for the farmer’s sake,

the insurance will pay.

It is like losing a year of your life.

To what would you lose a year of your life?

Afterward, you go back to the old place—

all that remains is char: blackness and emptiness.

You think: how could I live here?

But it was different then,

even last summer. The earth behaved

as though nothing could go wrong with it.

One match was all it took.

But at the right time—it had to be the right time.

The field parched, dry—

the deadness in place already

so to speak.

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