The Wild Iris

If I died tomorrow, I would want someone to read “The Wild Iris” at my funeral (from Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, published in 1992 by HarperCollins). “At the end of my suffering/there was a door./Hear me out, that which you call death/I remember.”

There is something incredibly hopeful about this poem and this book. In my mind, the poems are conversations
among The Gardener (I think she is a woman), various flowers, and God. I think it must be true that people
working in their own gardens—flowers, vegetables, trees—are closest to whatever idea of God that they hold in
their minds. It is not crazy to imagine that flowers speak, as I believe they do in this book. Why not?! We talk or
play music as we work in our gardens…we coax houseplants to do “better”…we give them a drink of
water…we touch plants lovingly (or pull them out by the roots!). And as we work, birds, squirrels, chipmunks,
and other critters seem to hold exuberant conversations with each other.

“…that which you fear, being/a soul and unable/to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth/bending a little…”
Louis Gluck continues…“You who do not remember/passage from the other world/I tell you I could speak
again: whatever/returns from oblivion returns/to find a voice.”…continues this poem. And I think that those
ideas also must be true. Surely, we return in some form or fashion after we die. Ashes to ashes; dust to
dust…the Phoenix rising from the flames…the return of green things in the spring.