The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

The Wild Iris
by Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.

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This is a woman who knows how to have come back from the other side of things. Louise Glück composed The Wild Iris in a remarkably short period — by her own account, ten weeks of intense writing in 1991 at her Vermont home, after long blocks where she could not write at all. The book is structured as three voices in conversation: the flowers speaking from the garden bed, the gardener speaking her morning and evening prayers, and a God-voice responding (the poems titled Matins and Vespers are the gardener's prayers; the poems titled Clear Morning, End of Summer, etc., are the God-voice). The Wild Iris — the title poem — opens the book in the iris's own voice, establishing the conceit that the flowers can teach the human. This poem is the iris's testimony. The iris has been buried, has lost speech, has returned, and speaks now from the authority of having actually undergone what the human only fears. The first time I read this, I nearly cried. It was post-divorce (my first one, I think), and I was having a feeling of being cracked open and to feel “from the center of m life came a great fountain.”