A Poet Reflects

Elms 

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire.  Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

—Louise Glück, from The Triumph of Achilles (The Ecco Press, 1985)