For some time now feminist and Marxist and psychoanalytic critics have been exploring the language of patriarchy, trying to unearth a female aesthetic from phallogocentric digs. The lexicon is often funny ("phallocrat" is one of my favorites; another is "phallogocentric," Jacques Derrida's neologism linking phallus, logos, and center, all three of which deconstruction attempts to undo). More often the language is clunky (how many of us doze off at the first assault of Signifier and Signified, or grind our teeth at the torturous infinitive "to privilege"?), or simply and drily obscure. But whatever the failures of the language, the idea behind it is not quite dismissible. The question is an intriguing one: Is there an aesthetic difference between women and men? And does that mean it is located in the sexual body? Is a marriage between the masculine art and the female body possible?….

Louise Glück's poems make the most explicit case for the uncrossable chasm between Eros and Art. Her landscape is the bombed-out world after sex. In The Triumph of Achilles passion does not unlock art; indeed, it strangles it. The dream of romance—long the province of the feminine—gives way to the "actual flesh" of love, which leads to silence and immobility: "What is a poet / without dreams? / I lie awake; I feel / actual flesh upon me, / meaning to silence me—("The Reproach"); "the man's mouth / sealing my mouth, the man's / paralyzing body" ("Mock Orange"); "Then I know what lies behind your silence: / scorn, hatred of me, of marriage. Still, / you want me to touch you; you cry out" ("Horse"). The body betrays the mind; the man suffocates the woman; and yet the woman in these poems falls again and again under the affliction of desire, the will paralyzed by sex.

The nine-part poem "Marathon" anatomizes desire and paralysis, not in progression—the movement from love to loss, say—but in stasis. The poem begins with "Last Letter"; abandonment and betrayal attendant from the inception:

Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray.
When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,
my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?

The poet, betrayed and abandoned, is frozen in an effigy of prayer. Her sexual nature has led to this, a Medusa selfimmobilized. Slowly she regains movement, the physical rigor released, but the psychic paralysis is complete:

I got up finally; I walked down to the pond.
I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,
like a girl after her first lover
turning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.
But nakedness in women is always a pose.
I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

The sexuality in this book loops like a Möbius strip around the twinned notions of death and freedom: the first a search for the father (the birth-right, the patronymic), the second a release from him; both of these in turn tied to the hunger for vision unobscured by physical desire. The erotic longing for the father finds its most acute expression in the sixth poem of "Marathon," titled "The Beginning." The poem presents itself as a dream addressed to the father, but the dream occurs outside time—before birth, but after sexual identity. The speaker takes on the sentient aspect of Wordsworth's infant-angels, waiting to be clothed in human flesh. But Glück's speaker knows she is female, knows she is doomed to be divided from the male. She comes, not trailing clouds of glory, but armed with pathetic knowledge:

The poignance of women, blood oranges, lies in their defeated similarity: "the markets made displays of them, beautiful displays—/ how else could they compete?" Then the terrible, and surgically revealed, heart: "And each arrangement had, at its center, / one fruit, cut open." This seems an intentional mixing of the body of the metaphor, for the heart of this fruit is genital and menstrual, centered not in the chest but in the womb.

These blood oranges carry a wealth, or burden, of Western poetic tradition as far back as Aristophanes. Anne Carson's essay in Before Sexuality, "Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt and Desire," traces the etymology of "ripeness" and female fruit from its Greek roots in drama and verse. In Greek society, she writes, a woman went directly from underripe (virginity) to overripe; there was no mid-point at all:

[A] woman's first sexual experience catapults her into uncontrolled sexual activity and out of the category of desirable sex-object, for she is past her peak the moment the ἂγθος (flower) falls.

A comparable distortion can be seen in Greek usage of the word όпώϱα This word means "fruit-time," the time between the rising of Seirios and of Arktouros when the fruit ripens, and also the fruit itself. When used metaphorically of males, όпώϱα signifies "the bloom of youth" or "ripe manhood," and does not exclude the pursuit of sexual fulfillment. But when used of females, όпώϱα means virginity and is to be withheld from all erotic experimentation…. When not guarded, a woman's όпώϱα becomes blackened (as an overripe fruit), undesirable and accursed….

Within these usages is operating an identification of female sexuality with voracious promiscuity and of virginity with the best moment of female life. Implicit here is a denial that free sexual activity and "blooming" are compatible for a woman. There is no such thing as sexually vigorous ripe womanhood in the Greek view. At her peak a woman is sexually untried. … As soon as she lets her ἂγθος (flower) fall, the female is translated to the slippery slope of overripeness: "A woman's prime is an inch of time!" wails Lysistrata.

In Louise Glück's poem, there's not even an inch of time. Each display has one fruit, already cut open. In ancient Greek verse, Carson says, "a woman who is being compared to an apple on a tree or a flower in a field can be said to wither the moment she is 'plucked.' Plucking is defloration." But here we haven't even the joy or erotic drama of plucking; "cut open" insists, in fact, on the violence of sexuality. "Plucking" summons the rhyme, of course, but beyond that carries the notion of human touch. "One fruit, cut open" has been removed from the realm of the human altogether. Some agency has mounded the display, some agency has sliced the center fruit. This "dark street lined with fruit stands" stretches all the way back to the earliest examination of sexual difference, and then forward to the poet's own individual imagining. The "I" descends to a reality already and forever inscribed by that cut-open fruit. That's the pathos and power of these poems: that whatever psychic, societal, legal inroads feminism has made into the depiction of female sexuality, this "I" remains confined in the reality of the body. The ancient world is the future world.

And this world belongs to the father; "in the dream, it was your city, I was looking for you." But erotic longing gives way to civilized forms; the woman kneeling in the yard, gardening, will become the mother: "I could hear / the woman call to me in common kindness, knowing / I wouldn't ask for you anymore—" The mother can call in "common kindness" because she knows the child cannot seriously compete for the father's sexual attention. "So it was settled: I could have a childhood there." Those are the prescribed conditions, and the daughter accepts them, indeed, she desires them:

Then what began as love for you
became a hunger for structure:

"A hunger for structure" may be the key element in all of Louise Glück's poems, for the terror of erotic love lies in its lack of structure, its boundarylessness. But the safety of civilized restraints proves to be illusory. The succeeding poem, "First Goodbye" (we're to think back to the first poem in the sequence, "Last Letter") presents the display of blood oranges in a new configuration, violent in its overdetermination. The lover, appropriately, has taken the place of the father; the proscriptions are in place; the foundations of civilization are intact. But beneath the order lies self-destruction. The poem begins in betrayal:

You can join the others now,
body that wouldn't let my body rest,
go back to the world, to avenues, the ordered
depths of the parks, like great terminals
that never darken: a stranger's waiting for you
in a hundred rooms. Go back to them,
to increment and limitation: near the centered rose,
you watch her peel an orange
so the dyed rind falls in petals on her plate. This
is mastery, whose active
mode is dissection: the enforced light
shines on the blade.

Go back to the world, back to the displays of oranges, back to the marketplace of women to choose a new one, a new hundred of them, what you'll find is … increment and limitation. Odd and unpoetic, the language of measurement, like the language of society, appears safe. But near the center of the display ("near the centered rose"—Dante's celestial flower reduced to this fruit-stand arrangement) a woman is dissecting herself. "This / is mastery, whose active / mode is dissection:" How are we to read this? As self-mutilation? As an erotic masochism specifically female? And yet "mastery" remains ironically masculine and dominant, or, in terms of the Medusa legend, Athenian. The mind's will over the body's desire. Athena, sprung from the dry head of Zeus, identifies with the will and intellect of the father; she cannot do otherwise. But Athena knows what it is to be afflicted with desire; the head of Medusa blazes from her shield, both protecting and violating her sexual integrity. She wars with her passionate double. In "First Goodbye" the Athenian side of "I" speaks, but only because her other sexual self has suffered betrayal. She has managed to climb back into her head, from which prospect (and vast remove) she can see her former lover and all his subsequent women:

And the women lying there—who wouldn't pity them,
the way they turn to you, the way
they struggle to be visible. They make
a place for you in bed, a white excavation.
Then the sacrament: your bodies pieced together,
churning, churning, till the heat leaves them entirely—

This is indeed a clinical remove, whose active mode is the dissection of analysis. And this analytical vista opens out into Athena's revenge, for she can see into the future:

To possess again what one has lost—that's the impossibility of Eros. And it's made doubly impossible by the realization that there never was that particular reality. The lover invented the beloved:

Sooner or later you will call my name,
cry of loss, mistaken
cry of recognition, of arrested need
for someone who exists in memory; no voice
carries to that kingdom.

What a satisfying revenge: no voice carries to that kingdom. And yet the undertone is unmistakable—this is the kingdom of the dead. The speaker dissects herself even as she coldly dissects the lover's future. Everyone loses.

To dissect one's self means to control one's destiny. Some medical experts say that, like anorexia, this kind of destructive control over the body is a sexual perversion. In societal terms, this "mastery"—ironic and masculine—signals the final female subjugation. In mythic terms, it signals the shifting dominances of female erotics, the duality personified in Athena and Medusa. In Glück's poetic, the mastery of self-dissection means poetry. Only by conquering the body—the sexuality that blurs distinctions, making poetry impossible—can the mind be free. The body glories in union, in coupling; the mind requires singularity. The body does not write poetry but effaces vision, leaving nothing to describe. "Song of Invisible Boundaries," the penultimate poem in "Marathon," clarifies the derailment effected by Eros:

Last night I dreamed we were in Venice;
today, we are in Venice. Now, lying here,
I think there are no boundaries to my dreams,
nothing we won't share.
So there is nothing to describe. We're interchangeable
with anyone, in joy
changed to a mute couple.

Then why did we worship clarity,
to speak, in the end, only each other's names,
to speak, as now, not even whole words,
only vowels?

The reduction of speech to mere vowels, the O's of sexual excitement, remind us of the earlier poems of muteness and suffocation, the "man's paralyzing body," the "man's mouth sealing my mouth"; the physical power of the man "meaning to silence me." Yet here the muteness is a "joy," which is why passion is so subversive. The speaker colludes with her own undoing:

Finally, this is what we craved,
this lying in the bright light without distinctions—
we who would leave behind
exact records.

Exactitude, of course, is impossible without distinctions. The bright light obliterates all boundaries, shapes, contours; it obviates the need or desire to "see." It frees the speaker from the hard, divisive work of poetry. In this aesthetic, the act of poetry belongs to the distinct and bounded world of the masculine, of cerebral Athena. The eros of the female, described as wet and unbounded in some poems, as blurred and lost in others ("The bed was like a raft," the poem "Summer" concludes, "I felt us drifting / far from our natures, toward a place where we'd discover nothing"), obscures vision. Glück's "hunger for structure"—which for her makes poetry possible—inclines toward the classical view. Anne Carson summarizes the Platonic model:

[W]e see that woman is to be differentiated from man, in the ancient view, not only as wet from dry but as content from form, as the unbounded from the bounded, as polluted from pure….

The image of woman as a formless content is one that is expressed explicitly in the philosophers. Plato compares the matter of creation to a mother, in his Timaios, for it is a "receptacle," "reservoir," "admission," which is "shapeless," "viewless," "all-receiving" and which "takes its form and activation from whatever shapes enter it." Aristotle accords to the male in the act of procreation the role of active agent, contributing "motion" and "formation" while the female provides the "raw material," as when a bed (the child) is made by a carpenter (the father) out of wood (the mother). Man determines the form, woman contributes the matter. Aristotle expresses a similar view in his Physics, and we might note that the Pythagorean table of oppositions sets Πέϱας ("boundary" or "limit") and ἂϱϱεν ("masculine") against ἂΠεϱζ ("the unbounded") and θἠλν ("feminine").

To be an artist, then, means to adopt the masculine imposition of boundary—how else can one survive the extinction of passion? But to take on the masculine notion of form does not mean the banishment of the female eros; nor does it mean an entirely successful self-mastery. In the dissection image of "First Goodbye" we're given the cryptic corollary: "the enforced light / shines on the blade." Again Glück points to an extrahuman agency that sets the wheels of destruction circling. Who or what enforces the light? The male dominance we're born into, instituted, as the earliest records attest, from the first structures of civilization? God? Or, in the intimate terms of "The Beginning," is it simply and irrevocably the father? Whatever forces conspire to focus the light on the blade, the use of that blade becomes the poem.

Divided from the father, using the tools of the father, succumbing to the father (or the lover that is his proxy)—all this seems to make a case for masculine power that cannot be equaled, or even approached, by the feminine. Analysis appears to win over passion. And yet the last, and most important, poem in "Marathon" (called "Marathon") eerily sabotages what we think we have been thinking through these nine stages. Here's the entire poem:

I was not meant to hear
the two of them talking.
But I could feel the light of the torch
stop trembling, as though it had been
set on a table. I was not to hear
the one say to the other
how best to arouse me,
with what words, what gestures,
nor to hear the description of my body,
how it responded, what
it would not do. My back was turned.
I studied the voices, soon distinguishing
the first, which was deeper, closer,
from that of the replacement.
For all I know, this happens
every night: somebody waking me, then
the first teaching the second.
What happens afterward
occurs far from the world, at a depth
where only the dream matters
and the bond with any one soul
is meaningless; you throw it away.

Beyond the obvious (woman as sex-toy, plaything to be shared between men), lies the poet's astounding decision to remain still and study the voices, to analyze, in effect, her own erotic. And here the significance of the word "marathon" takes on greater dimension. In Greek Olympiads, of course, the marathon runners were men, testing their strength, endurance, prowess, all based on their own knowledge of their own bodies—how they responded, what they would and would not do. They competed against other runners, but they raced against themselves. Louise Glück shifts the grounds of the metaphor. Here the sexual engine is female; the males must run in relay, as they haven't the stamina or endurance to perform singly. The body of the woman (in her sleeping state, the normal one when she is "not supposed to hear" the men discussing her) is presented simply as object, a baton passed between teammates as they run. And therefore we expect the indictment. Socially, politically, psychically, poetically this condition of "object" is unacceptable. Acquiescence is unthinkable. And yet the speaker in the poem does not move: "For all I know, this happens / every night: somebody waking me, then / the first teaching the second." Could it be that we're misreading this phallic relay? That in fact the men are objects, mere erotic instruments? The poet doesn't say. "What happens afterward / occurs far from the world," far from our notions of the politically correct, far, even, from the speaker's Athenian ability to analyze and dissect her own sexuality. The world of the father, with its civilizing restraints, its boundaries, its specific attachments, recedes; passion takes the "I" to a depth "where only the dream matters / and the bond with any one soul / is meaningless; you throw it away." That's a terrifying conclusion. The anchor of fidelity, marriage, normal sexual response—all lost. The exactitude necessary for art—gone. "The bond with any one soul is meaningless; you throw it away." The nihilism of Eros means social abdication—the death of the Father—but it also means the dissolution of self and thus the death of art. In a way, this marathon races between the poet's two selves, where the line distinguishing male and female, will and genitals, art and passion, is crossed and recrossed, whose only finish is death. "It will run its course," Glück says in "The Encounter,"