Louise Glück: Meadowlands
by
Amanda Fiore
The heart of a woman is a mysterious
and sometimes dark, and hurtful thing.
Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands is
a poetic unveiling, without apology or artifice, of the darkest secrets of a
woman’s heart in the throes of loving.
She shows both the domestic tenderness of marriage as well as the
hurtful, narcissistic bickering of both taking, and being taken,
fore-granted. She writes, in direct,
thoughtful prose, of what most women spend their lives trying to deny: the fury
unlocked by intense emotion. The poems
accomplish an in depth telling of this tale in a variety of voices, though each
echoes the other, bringing to life the love affairs of men, gods and goddesses,
parents, children, and birds. In the
end, we are reassured that these muddied waters of marriage and heartache are,
in fact, part of the package. Though
they are dark, and at times hateful, they are not to be feared or avoided, but
embraced, for without the embracing, one will never love at all.
Scattered throughout the book are
poems that seem to be talking both within and between them. She begins with a poem for Penelope, who is
waiting for Odysseus to return “like a sentry or lookout. He will be home soon; it/behooves you to
be/generous. You have not been
completely/perfect either.” A few pages
later a woman sitting comfortably with a man compares their love to the Greek
couple, saying, “So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus, /not to hold him back
but to impress/this peace on his memory. /from this point on the silence
through which you move/is my voice pursing you.” And a few poems later, we hear the troubled
and desperate plea of a woman who calls out in the last lines of Departure.
“How can I know you love me/unless I see you grieve over me?” And so the theme of love is set. The complicated love of woman: at once full
of sweetness and tenderness, missing her husband, waiting for him to return,
wanting to please him, to remind him of how peaceful their love can be, and at
the same time, desiring to cause him pain, so that she may feel comfort.
In the first of the series of poems
for which the book is named, Meadowlands
I, a woman says to her husband: “I wish we went on walks/like Steven and
Kathy; then/we’d be happy. You can even
see it in the dog. /We don’t have a dog. /we have a hostile cat.” At once there is the intimacy of married
life, and the deep ravines of doubt, carried into every detail of life, even
the animals. But of course marriage is
more complex than just that; there is also the fear spawned from insecurity
that leads to the kind of breakdowns that leave us crying, alone, as we take
out the garbage, a symbol of domestic ritual.
In Midnight we meet a woman
who is doing just this. She says,
“Speak to me, aching heart: what
ridiculous errand are you inventing
for yourself
weeping in the dark garage
with your sack of garbage: it is not
your job
to take out the garbage, it is your
job
to empty the dishwasher.
And
a few lines later,
is this the way you communicate
with your husband, not answering
when he calls, or is this the way the
heart
behaves when it grieves: it wants to
be
alone with the garbage? If I were you,
I’d think ahead. After fifteen years,
his voice could be getting tired; some
night
if you don’t answer, someone else will
answer.”
Here is a woman who feels the
distance between herself and her lover, but rather than speak it out, sits
alone as he calls her, does not answer the phone, and cries. She is a woman trying to make a point, lost
in the angry domesticity of garbage duty and dish washing, and at the same
time, scared to death of losing the same man who now she both ignores, and
chides. A woman’s heart is a complex
thing, at once chained down by and desperate for, in spite of ourselves, the
ones we love; the myriad of things we do to both gain their attention, and push
them away.
Quickly the themes of domestic
quarreling as one aspect of this complicated tapestry emerge. In Ceremony,
Gluck says: “One thing I’ve always hated/about you: I hate that you refuse/to
have people at the/house. Flaubert/had
more friends and Flaubert/was a recluse.”
Some pages later, in Void, she
continues the conversation, exclaiming to her lover who is having company, in a
voice dripping with sarcasm: “Actual people!
Actual human beings/sitting on our chairs in our living room!” And later, on the same subject, one says to the
other: “You hate parties. You hate/any
group bigger than four,” and the other retorts, “If I hate it/I’ll go
upstairs.” We are being shown the
mundane bickering and resentment that permeates in domestic partnerships, and
the way that one’s intimate knowledge of the other can be used to hurt.
Gluck continues quite skillfully to
develop the theme of domestic bickering; of both intense pain and comfort
existed simultaneously. In Anniversary we hear a man talking to his
wife as if he were allowing her, as a gift, the right to snuggle, and
simultaneously chiding her for doing it wrong.
He says to her, “I said you could snuggle. That does mean/your cold feet all over my
dick. . . But I didn’t want your hand there./I wanted you here.” And so even love-making, even the intimate
and beautiful space of the bedroom is turned into a harsh and uncomfortable
place of domestic ritual gone sour. Love
is not perfect, and intimacy can be a dangerously hurtful thing. The things that we trust our lovers with are
at once beautiful secrets, and the makings of ammunition, to be hurled
carelessly back into our faces.
The theme of women who want to hold
and control their men; women whose love is so deep and so strained and
desperate that it needs or aims to hurt their men, or to put them down in order
to be comfortable; in order to be able, perhaps, to trust them, is artfully and
unabashedly shown. We hear in The Rock a woman talking to the devil
about sending her husband to hell for just this very reason. She says:
what is required in hell,
for I would send
my beloved there. . . .
I may want him
back sometime, not
permanently harmed but
severely chastened,
as he has not been, here
And a few lines further down,
What shall I give him for protection,
what
shield that will not
wholly screen him? You must be
his guide and master: help him
shed his skin
as you do, though in this case
we want him
older underneath, maybe
a little mousy.
She wants her husband to be hurt, so
that he will appreciate her more, and become more obedient; easier to trust and
control. To add depth and layer to this
we then hear, in part of her series with the name Telemachus, that “I believe/women like to see a man/still whole,
still standing, but/about to go to pieces: such/disintegration reminds them/of
passion.” Now a full image of a woman’s
love has been spun; a love that is at once beautiful and spiteful, controlling
and full of rage, while at the same time sweet and desperate, both with and
for, love.
Towards the end of the book the
poetic voice calms and we begin to intuit an acceptance of the tumultuous
nature of that thing that binds all humans together, and also rips us
apart. In The Parable of the Swans we see echoes of human love, and get,
perhaps, our first calm and reflective insight that seems to accept all of what
has been presented as nothing more or less than life. Perhaps the bickering presented above is
merely part and parcel of what we must understand to be love, and the drama of
it; the pain of it is, in fact, part of what love is. She says of the swans:
Sooner or later in a long
life together, every couple encounters
some emergency like this, some
drama which results
in harm. This
occurs for a reason: to test
love and to demand
fresh articulation of its complex
terms.
And a few lines further down,
whereas
the male believed that love
was what one felt in ones heart
the female believed
love was what one did.
And then,
On the muddy water
they bickered awhile, in the fading
light,
until the bickering grew
slowly abstract, becoming
part of their song
after a little longer.
A few pages later we hear in The Parable of Faith, (in italics), “Do you know/what forgiveness means? It means/the world has sinned, the world/must
be pardoned--” And so we are told
that the world is made of wrong-doings and things we wish we could take back;
these things are not special, they are what is.
If we are to exist in the world, we must also learn to forgive. Perhaps there is hope, yet, for our married
couple? We are then brought back into
the relationship of Penelope and Odysseus just as Odysseus returns from his
voyage. We hear of it, “He tells
her/nothing of those years, choosing to speak instead/exclusively of small
things, as would be/the habit of a man and a woman long together:/once she sees
who he is, she will know what he’s done./And as he speaks, ah,/tenderly he
touches her forearm.” Many things have
they both done to be ashamed of, but their sweet love for each other, and the
tenderness they both feel, will outlast what they have done. Like the swans, they accept the hurt, or the
bickering, as part and parcel of the love.
Meadowlands
is an amazing collection of love poems that do not pretend that love is
anything but what it is. Gluck’s use of
unabashed, unapologetic language that at once unveils, unleashes, and celebrates
human emotion is fully glorious, frightful, and important.