Crossroads

CROSSROADS

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

Louise Elisabeth Glück

The most varied flowers can be found in the vast garden of poetry. In the everyday self-absorbed walks, we pass by the most beautiful gardens without even noticing them, sometimes even through them without realizing that they are something radically different from the stiff and impersonal cement that covers our cities.

From time to time, a flower of extreme beauty knocks intensively on the door of our senses and makes the needle of our perceptions jump. This is what happened to me when I came across the poem “Crossroads”. It caught my attention because it reminded me of the great story by Jorge Luis Borges: "The Garden of Forking Paths". It attracted me, even more, when I realized its author was Louise Glück, who had been recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2020.

An American, born in 1943 in New York City, she has an enormous career in letters and has received the most important awards during her long and very fertile career. She is said to be the poet of everyday things, of the simple events of every day, an explorer of the beauty of everyday life and simple emotions. One of those people who, following my previous metaphor, never passes through the gardens without perceiving the flowers, never ceasing to be stunned by the beauty, without evading sadness, without fear of emotional storms.

This poem shows us a crossroads; the inevitable forced bifurcation from which soul and body will forever follow different paths. Let's avoid observing it from our own beliefs, ontologies, and epistemologies. Let ourselves be impressed by the acknowledgments, the apologies, and the intensity of the farewell of these two dear friends - perhaps the most endearing friendship of all. So betrothed, that we walk through life without recognizing its limits, but rather seeing them as a single and unique entity that is not even apparent to our eyes due to its extreme familiarity.

Aware that the moment of the farewell is imminently close, Glück values the body as the material reality of being in the world and does so by evoking the youthful loves, full of passion and excess. She acknowledges the limitations imposed by nature and culture to that unconditional and passionate love that often suffers from the pruning of what "should be", "what is used" and what "for now is not accepted".

My body, forgive the brutality of my soul, its ancestral fears, its extreme limitations. In these conditions of vulnerability, my soul has exercised violence against you, demanding from you beyond your possibilities, or beyond your potential. She subdued you, disciplined you, rationalized you. Now she doubts that this has been the most convenient, the most appropriate.

That combative and demanding soul, belatedly valuing you and glimpsing your absence, now approaches you solicitously, softly, carefully to confess that what life is to miss is not to stop being, but not to be able to count on you.

By Ricardo Teodoro Ricci

October 2020

Baltimore, MD·Posted Thu, January 14

Publicado en: https://ars-medica.mn.co/posts/crossroads