I am against
symmetry, he said. He was holding in both hands
an unbalanced piece of wood that had been
very large once, like the limb of a tree:
this was before its second life in the water,
after which, though there was less of it
in terms of mass, there was greater
spiritual density. Driftwood,
he said, confirms my view—this is why it seems
inherently dramatic. To make this point,
he tapped the wood. Rather violently, it seemed,
because a piece broke off.
Movement! he cried. That is the lesson! Look at these paintings,
he said, meaning ours. I have been making art
longer than you have been breathing
and yet my canvases have life, they are drowning
in life—Here he grew silent.
I stood beside my work, which now seemed rigid and lifeless.
We will take our break now, he said.
I stepped outside, for a moment, into the night air.
It was a cold night. The town was on a beach,
near where the wood had been.
I felt I had no future at all.
I had tried and I had failed.
I had mistaken my failures for triumphs.
The phrase smoke and mirrors entered my head.
And suddenly my teacher was standing beside me,
smoking a cigarette. He had been smoking for many years,
his skin was full of wrinkles.
You were right, he said, the way
instinctively you stepped aside.
Not many do that, you’ll notice.
The work will come, he said. The lines
will emerge from the brush. He paused here
to gaze calmly at the sea in which, now,
all the planets were reflected. The driftwood
is just a show, he said; it entertains the children.
Still, he said, it is rather beautiful, I think,
like those misshapen trees the Chinese grow.
Pun-sai, they’re called. And he handed me
the piece of driftwood that had broken off.
Start small, he said. And patted my shoulder.
—Louise Glück
Louise Glück teaches at Yale and Stanford and lives in Cambridge. Her most recent book of poems, Faithful and Virtuous Night, won the National Book Award in 2014.
