The Destination

by Louise Glück

I was going to write this whole thing about love, relationship, loss, and change. Two months later and I was still struggling to figure out how to make it meaningful, so that it resonated with anyone except myself. I wrote down a lot about Glück’s “destination,” what that meant in her poem, what it meant to me. In those, the question seems to be: who is the destination? Is it an island in the great archipelago of people and relationships we sail by in the dark? Can it be that the destination is someone we find along the way? Is it skin, a body, a voice?

I was frustrated because I seemed to have a few fragments that didn’t seem to matter. We get to know so many people. We mistake temporary things for the destination all the time. It’s possible there are many destinations. Like Glück’s narrator, I too have wondered if the destination, the “center of my amorous life,” was something that turned out to be just something ephemeral, just because it was nearly without risk. The destination is whatever you trick yourself into believing it is. There is no destination. The destination is death, etc. etc. The poem was good enough to speak for itself, and whatever perspective I brought to it could hardly measure up.

Of course there are different and more literal destinations. An amazing thing has been witnessing so much of life still going on during the pandemic which seems to have no end in sight. Engagements, moves, marriages, houses bought, babies born. I’ve marveled at how people have arrived at these destinations, these new, great moments in their lives despite the constant turmoil and uncertainty that hangs over everything. I think about my own life these past few years, the places I’ve come to, the people I’ve met. I didn’t expect so much of it, and am grateful for it all, and I only want more.

I’ve kept a journal since 2011, and every year on December 31st (the date as I write this) I look back through the volumes, and I am always amazed at how few times in the decade-plus years did I write anything on or around the new year. The few entries that exist read so strangely to me now: a self I barely recognize remarks on accomplishments, sorrows, hopes, worries, regrets, and anxieties about things I have since utterly forgotten about, but that, in some sense or another, brought me to where I am now.

My whole reason for doing this poem project thing was to have something that would regularly force me to contemplate about writing and give me a chance to not only reflect on what these poems meant to me, but also to think about my own creativity, and what shape my own writing might take on. I think about those old journal entries, my current ones, and these reflections too, and think about who I might be when I read them so many years in the future: How different will I be, and in what way? Some of the poems I memorized this year date back almost as far as my earliest journals. In the same sense that I reread those entries in almost disbelief, I’ve found such wild new meaning in these poems, and can only predict, with a mixture of fear and excitement, that it will be true of both them and of who I am in 2022, 2031, or beyond.

So I think once again about these words. It’s easier now because I can call them up from memory. I wonder about our possible, but untouched hopes. The human wolves, unafraid—but also, of sailing beyond the face of fear. The big one, waiting. The best of all our days, the brooms on the beach, and everything else we’ll waste and throw away. The destination—and then, the letting go—

what will they become?








































































































































































































































































































the letting go.