Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

"You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confrontmuch sorrow and disappointment. He gazed at me with increasing frankness. I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence."

"As I turned over the last page, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among infinite stars? I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be."

"A word drops into the mistlike a child's ball into high grasswhere it remains seductivelyflashing and glinting untilthe gold bursts are revealed to besimply field buttercups. Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me."

"I think here I will leave you. It has come to seemthere is no perfect ending. Indeed, there are infinite endings. Or perhaps, once one begins,there are only endings."

"(after many years) we were still at that first stage, stillpreparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;we could see this in one another; we had changed althoughwe never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, travelingfrom day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemedin a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purposebelieved this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain freein order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed."