Louise Glück Ararat

Gluck's sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father's hollow life and her mother's inability to express emotion.

 

As I saw it,

all my mother's life, my father

held her down, like

lead strapped to her ankles.

She was

buoyant by nature;

she wanted to travel,

go to the theater, go to museums.

What he wanted

was to lie on the couch

with the Times

over his face,

so that death, when it came,

wouldn't seem a significant change. ~Louise Glück Ararat