Afterword

Reading what I have just written, I now believe 

I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been 

slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly 

but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort 

sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes. 

Why did I stop? Did some instinct 

discern a shape, the artist in me 

intervening to stop traffic, as it were? 

A shape. Or fate, as the poets say, 

intuited in those few long ago hours -

I must have thought so once. 

And yet I dislike the term 

which seems to me a crutch, a phase, 

the adolescence of the mind, perhaps -

Still, it was a term I used myself, 

frequently to explain my failures. 

Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings 

now seem to me simply 

local symmetries, metonymic 

baubles within immense confusion -

Chaos was what I saw. 

My brush froze - I could not paint it. 

Darkness, silence: that was the feeling. 

What did we call it then? 

A "crisis of vision" corresponding, I believed, 

to the tree that confronted my parents, 

but whereas they were forced 

forward into the obstacle, 

I retreated or fled -

Mist covered the stage (my life). 

Characters came and went, costumes were changed, 

my brush hand moved side to side 

far from the canvas, 

side to side, like a windshield wiper. 

Surely this was the desert, the dark night. 

(In reality, a crowded street in London, 

the tourists waving their colored maps.) 

One speaks a word: I. 

Out of this stream 

the great forms -

I took a deep breath. And it came to me 

the person who drew that breath 

was not the person in my story, his childish hand 

confidently wielding the crayon -

Had I been that person? A child but also 

an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom 

the vegetation parts -

And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted 

solitude Kant perhaps experienced 

on his way to the bridges -

(We share a birthday.) 

Outside, the festive streets 

were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights. 

A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder 

singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano -

Bravo! the door is shut. 

Now nothing escapes, nothing enters -

I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert 

stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems) 

on all sides, shifting as I speak, 

so that I was constantly 

face to face with blankness, that 

stepchild of the sublime, 

which, it turns out, 

has been both my subject and my medium. 

What would my twin have said, had my thoughts 

reached him? 

Perhaps he would have said 

in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument) 

after which I would have been 

referred to religion, the cemetery where 

questions of faith are answered. 

The mist had cleared. The empty canvases 

were turned inward against the wall. 

The little cat is dead (so the song went). 

Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks. 

And the sun says yes. 

And the desert answers 

your voice is sand scattered in wind.

Louise Glück