In a short essay titled "To the seminar" (1974) Roland Barthes stated that the text is "both an irrational expenditure and an inflexible reserve." This article proposes a reading of two poems by contemporary American poet Louise Glück. It explores how these are torn between "an irrational expenditure" and "an inflexible reserve." "Penelope's Song" (Meadowlands 1996) confesses the utter impossibility to confess anything while casting Romantic lyricism away in an ironic aria. The poem and its form are caught in a literal contra-diction, interweaving song and poem, speech and writing. In "A Sharply Worded Silence," (Faithful and Virtuous Night 2014) speech is caught between the urgency of saying something and the endless deferring of the saying itself. Its writing preciously holds meaning in reserve, underneath language while keeping it at bay. This article means to show how Glück's poetics oscillates between writing and orality, between narrative expansiveness and the folding of the lyrical instance on itself. It explores how her poetics examine the very margin of lyricism without ever giving it up.