Nostos by Louise Glϋck
We look at the world once, in childhood/the rest is memory. -Louise Glϋck
Trees: the silver maple sentinel in front of my family home for 60 years, and my father’s black walnut grove, and the dying pine windbreak, the crabapple and plums, the birches and poplars, greet me at my mother’s house. Here’s the silver maple set against a rainbow on one of my family’s clean-out days a few months after her death.
“Nostos” is a Greek term that refers to heroic, joyful homecoming. Our word “nostalgia” refers to the melancholy or pain of going back home in our minds. Trees don’t care about our moods or states of mind.
Nostos
There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
Harbors of Heaven 