Never tire of looking at the stars

“The rest I have told you already a few years of fluency, and then the long silence, like the silence in the valley before the mountains send back your own voice changed to the voice of nature” — Louise Glück, Averno. Dwelling amidst mercurial images of nature, ‘never tire of looking at the stars’ sees flesh and flora meld into one another - a porous boundary between the states of life and death, body and nature - a humming cyclical landscape. Water glows from both within and without; eyes are bright as spectral bodies, pupils shrinking aperture-like into black pinpoints. These living things invoke each other - one is not merely the reflection of the other; they are each other's emotionality: what is felt in the land, is felt in the body. Stained-glass colours engender surreal affect and time hangs heavy as bright blue sky witnesses both day and twilight. Are these memories of a once-beautiful past, or are they lush visions of the future? Is the memory itself more beautiful than what was? There is no finality, just the ebb and flow of ever-changing light and darkness. Near the end of Louise Glück’s Averno, the speaker asks Zeus “how [to] endure the earth.” Zeus replies, “in a short time you will be here again. / And in the time between / you will forget everything / those fields of ice will be / the meadows of Elysium.”