Vespers [“Once I Believed in You…]
Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.
By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
exclusively in warmer climates,
in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,
where are grown the unimaginable
apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps
they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see
the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself
to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.
If there is justice in some other world, those
like myself, whom nature forces
into lives of abstinence, should get
the lion's share of all things, all
objects of hunger, greed being
praise of you. And no one praises
more intensely than I, with more
painfully checked desire, or more deserves
to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking
of the perishable, the immortal fig,
which does not travel.
Louise Glück (1943–2023) was an American poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020 for what the poet Robert Hass called “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States. Glück is best known for lyric poems of linguistic precision and dark tone. The poet Craig Morgan Teicher has described her as a writer for whom "words are always scarce, hard won, and not to be wasted". The scholar Laura Quinney has argued that her careful use of words put Glück into "the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression", from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop. Glück's poems shifted in form throughout her career, beginning with short, terse lyrics composed of compact lines and expanding into connected book-length sequences. Her work is not known for poetic techniques such as rhyme or alliteration. Rather, the poet Robert Hahn has called her style "radically inconspicuous" or "virtually an absence of style", relying on a voice that blends "portentous intonations" with a conversational approach.
