"Nostos" by Louise Glück

There and back again.

Nostos

There was an apple tree in the yard—
this would have been
forty years ago—behind,
only meadow. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts—
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

—Louise Glück
from Meadowlands (Ecco, 1996); reprinted in Poems 1962–2012 (FSG, 2012)

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What I love about “Nostos” is what I love about so much of Glück’s work: the intensity of focus, and the sensation of entering another’s consciousness so completely that it feels like your own, both effects accomplished by careful management of the line, by the way enjambment can cut across syntax to enact the movement of the mind.

The opening five lines establish the logic that structures the rest of the poem, its pattern of incompletion and association, continuity and rupture. The opening line alone give us a microcosm of this tension:

There was an apple tree in the yard—

It’s a complete sentence—and yet not, the em dash denoting fragmentation, the statement breaking off. More accurately, a breaking away from, as line 2 directs us into a new temporality:

this would have been
forty years ago—

The shift from the simple past “there was” to “this would have been” is weirdly complicated. It was forty years ago, and there’s no conditionality implied by the usage, but the idiomatic construction evokes demotic speech—the sense that we are being spoken to, or perhaps speaking to ourselves. It’s a storytelling gesture that shifts our sense of time, from past recollection to present-tense situating of the image. And it colours mood as well, introducing the minor chord of “would”: a word of longing, of distance on its own. This distance is revealed as temporal when line 3 opens with the unit of time—forty years—but abruptly turns spatial as another interruptive em dash is followed by the preposition “behind,” pulling us again into the realm of the concrete, letting us hang there for an instant in uncertainty: behind what?

So there is a lot going on, if you track the movement line by line and word by word, attentive to the subtlest shifts in verb tense, grammatical mood, intonation, and to read Glück I think you must be. But I find this concentration so rewarding, and the precision, ironically, disarming. In this instance, it’s how it captures the way we tell stories, which is also the way memory works. An image arises, unanchored, and the mind finds a place for it, slots it back into a larger narrative.

Thus situated, Glück returns to image, and sets up another syntactic pattern that will recur:

only meadow. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.

The line offers a point of rest after the push and pull that precedes it, the single word “meadow” allowed to act as its own image. Buoyed by “drifts,” the image deepens, though once again we’re balanced on a wire at the end of the line: first I think snowdrift, remembering my childhood meadow, the delicious winter days spent sledding the steep hills, but “crocus” revises the line that came before so that the earth foams white with efflorescence, not with ice.

This construction is not difficult to puzzle out, and it happens so fast as to be unconscious, but hanging that single opening word of a sentence at the end of line, which the poem will go on to do three more times—“Spring,” “Substitution,” “What”—again enacts what feels to me the central tension: a striking out and then a pulling back. A discovery, and a determination. It’s a movement that makes me prefer the verb recollect to remember: from the Latin recollectus, past participle of recolligere: re, or “again” + colligere: “gather.” In placing the fleeting—apple tree, yard, meadow, drifts, crocus—the mind gathers back a whole life.

Nostos: from Ancient Greek νόστος: the act of reaching a place. The act of returning, of going back. Returning home; homecoming; a safe journey home. We know it best combined with the Greek algos (pain, grief, distress), from which we get nostalgia, and I love how Glück reclaims the root from what we now commonly consider pathology. She simply goes home, wanting to see it clearly. There is a cleanness to the endeavour, a nobility of soul. What can possibly belong to us more fully than our own lives? Nostalgia may be a kind of sickness, but it need not be our only relationship to the past. What should be more meaningful than the place where we began, and what more life-affirming than the desire to stay connected to first experience, first sight. The rest is only memory.

There was a pear tree in the meadow— / this would have been / forty years ago—behind, / only woods. (Bushong Road, Eden Township, Pennsylvania, 1986.)

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In other long-ago Pennsylvania recollections, I am delighted to have a poem up at the inimitable High Country News, thanks to the also-inimitable Paisley Rekdal.

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