Can't you do better?

— Photo by Maurice van Bruggen

“What are you saying? That you want

eternal life? Are your thoughts really

as compelling as all that?…”

— From “Field of Flowers,’’ by Louise Gluck (born 1943). The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for her poems, she lives in Cambridge, Mass., and is writer in residence at Yale.

In Garden in the Woods, a 45-acre woodland botanical garden, at 180 Hemenway Rd., Framingham, Mass. It is the headquarters of The Native Plant Trust, and is open to visitors between April 14 and Oct. 15.

'Everything had ripened at once'

"Remember the days of our first happiness,
how strong we were, how dazed by passion,
lying all day, then all night in the narrow bed,
sleeping there, eating there too: it was summer,
it seemed everything had ripened
at once. And so hot we lay completely uncovered.
Sometimes the wind rose; a willow brushed the window.''

From "Summer,'' by Louise Gluck