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Collected Poems

Page 1

by Jack Gilbert




  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Poems in this collection originally appeared in the following works: Views of Jeopardy, copyright © 1962 by Yale University Press (Yale University Press, 1962); Monolithos, copyright © 1963, 1965, 1966, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); The Great Fires, copyright © 1994 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Refusing Heaven, copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); and The Dance Most of All, copyright © 2009 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

  Poems collected here for the first time were originally published in the following publications:

  The Kenyon Review: “Secrets of Poetry”; The New Republic: “Spring”; The New Yorker: “Convalescing.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gilbert, Jack, [date]

  [Poems, Selections]

  Collected poems / by Jack Gilbert.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96074-0

  I. Title.

  PS3557.I34217A6 2012

  811’.54—dc23

  2011025743

  Cover image: Jack, 1960, woodcut by

  Gianna Gelmetti (1937–2010)

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  v3.1_r1

  For Gianna Gelmetti, Michiko Nogami, and Linda Gregg

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  VIEWS OF JEOPARDY [1962]

  In Dispraise of Poetry

  Perspective He Would Mutter Going to Bed

  Elephants

  And She Waiting

  It May Be No One Should Be Opened

  House on the California Mountain

  Myself Considered as the Monster in the Foreground

  In Perugino We Have Sometimes Seen Our Country

  A Poem for the Fin Du Monde Man

  Rain

  County Musician

  Malvolio in San Francisco

  Orpheus in Greenwich Village

  Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell

  Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell (II)

  Before Morning in Perugia

  Midnight Is Made of Bricks

  The Night Comes Every Day to My Window

  Meelee’s Away

  The Abnormal Is Not Courage

  Lions

  Susanna and the Elders

  The Four Perfectly Tangerines

  The First Morning of the World on Long Island

  I’ll Try to Explain About the Fear

  Poem for Laura

  New York, Summer

  The Bay Bridge from Potrero Hill

  On Growing Old in San Francisco

  Without Watteau, Without Burckhardt, Oklahoma

  Letter to Mr. John Keats

  Portolano

  It Is Clear Why the Angels Come No More

  The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades

  MONOLITHOS: Poems 1962 and 1982 [1982]

  ONE—1962

  Between Poems

  The Plundering of Circe

  Islands and Figs

  Poetry Is a Kind of Lying

  For Example

  The Sirens Again

  Alba

  Ostinato rigore

  A Bird Sings to Establish Frontiers

  Bartleby at the Wall

  TWO—[MONOLITHOS]—1982

  All the Way from There to Here

  Not Part of Literature

  Trying to Be Married

  Registration

  More Than Friends

  That Tenor of Which the Night Birds Are a Vehicle

  Walking Home Across the Island

  Mistrust of Bronze

  Angelus

  A Kind of World

  Leaving Monolithos

  Divorce

  Remembering My Wife

  Pewter

  Night After Night

  Hunger

  Sects

  They Call It Attempted Suicide

  Meniscus

  Who’s There

  Meaning Well

  Template

  Siege

  Translation into the Original

  Burning and Fathering: Accounts of My Country

  The Fashionable Heart

  Breakfast

  Losing

  The Rainy Forests of Northern California

  Il mio tesoro

  Don Giovanni in Trouble

  The Movies

  Byzantium Burning

  They Will Put My Body into the Ground

  Love Poem

  Elephant Hunt in Guadalajara

  Pavane

  Loyalty

  Song

  Getting Ready

  Sul ponticello

  The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon

  A Description of Happiness in København

  New Hampshire Marble

  My Marriage with Mrs. Johnson

  Heart Skidding

  Games

  My Graveyard in Tokyo

  Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan

  Textures

  The Revolution

  Mexico

  Another Grandfather

  Singing in My Difficult Mountains

  Threshing the Fire

  THE GREAT FIRES: Poems 1982–1992 [1994]

  Going Wrong

  Guilty

  The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

  Lovers

  Measuring the Tyger

  Voices Inside and Out

  Tear It Down

  Dante Dancing

  The Great Fires

  Finding Something

  Prospero Without His Magic

  Finding Eurydice

  Going There

  Haunted Importantly

  Searching for Pittsburgh

  Married

  Explicating the Twilight

  Steel Guitars

  Recovering amid the Farms

  The Spirit and the Soul

  To See If Something Comes Next

  A Stubborn Ode

  Scheming in the Snow

  Ruins and Wabi

  Betrothed

  Trying to Have Something Left Over

  On Stone

  Relative Pitch

  1953

  Alone

  Adulterated

  What Is There to Say?

  Prospero Dreams of Arnaut Daniel Inventing Love in the Twelfth Century

  Tasters for the Lord

  Carrying Torches at Noon

  A Year Later

  Looking Away from Longing

  Factoring

  The Milk of Paradise

  Gift Horses

  Hard Wired

  The White Heart of God

  Michiko Nogami (1946–1982)

  The Container for the Thing Contained

  Moment of Grace

  The Lord Sits with Me Out in Front

  Between Aging and Old

  The History of Men

  Older Women

  Exceeding

  Infidelity

  Highlights and Interstices

  Peaches

  Music Is the Memory of What Never Happened

  Alternatives

  Michiko Dead

  Ghosts

  Harm and Boon in the Meetings

  Man at a Window

  Sonatina

  Foraging for Wood on the
Mountain

  In Umbria

  Conceiving Himself

  Chastity

  Me and Capablanca

  A Ghost Sings, a Door Opens

  I Imagine the Gods

  Thinking About Ecstasy

  Night Songs and Day Songs

  Eating with the Emperor

  Playing House

  Beyond Beginnings

  Theoretical Lives

  From These Nettles, Alms

  Hot Nights in Florida

  Getting It All

  The Edge of the World

  Leporello on Don Giovanni

  First Times

  Half the Truth

  Respect

  The Lives of Famous Men

  Getting Old

  How to Love the Dead

  Almost Happy

  REFUSING HEAVEN [2005]

  A Brief for the Defense

  Naked Except for the Jewelry

  Put Her in the Fields for Kindness

  What Song Should We Sing

  Having the Having

  Say You Love Me

  Kunstkammer

  Halloween

  Elegy for Bob (Jean McLean)

  Résumé

  More than Sixty

  By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.

  Once upon a Time

  A Close Call

  The Rooster

  Failing and Flying

  Burning (Andante non troppo)

  The Other Perfection

  A Ball of Something

  Getting Away with It

  Truth

  Transgressions

  The Abandoned Valley

  Happening Apart from What’s Happening Around It

  Exceeding the Spirit

  Meditation Eleven: Reading Blake Again

  How Much of That Is Left in Me?

  ’Tis Here! ’Tis Here! ’Tis Gone! (The Nature of Presence)

  Ambition

  Being Young Back Then

  Not Getting Closer

  Adults

  Seen from Above

  Getting Closer

  The Mail

  Less Being More

  Homage to Wang Wei

  The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper

  Doing Poetry

  Homesteading

  The Sweet Taste of the Night

  Honor

  Trying to Write Poetry

  A Kind of Courage

  Happily Planting the Beans Too Early

  What to Want

  Bring in the Gods

  The Negligible

  The Lost Hotels of Paris

  Feathers or Lead

  What Plenty

  The Garden

  Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played

  Winning on the Black

  Refusing Heaven

  The Friendship Inside Us

  A Thanksgiving Dance

  Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

  Immaculate

  Moreover

  A Kind of Decorum

  A Walk Blossoming

  Farming in Secret

  December Ninth, 1960

  Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness

  Infidelity

  The Reinvention of Happiness

  Looking at Pittsburgh from Paris

  “My Eyes Adored You”

  Beyond Pleasure

  Duende

  The Good Life

  Flat Hedgehogs

  Prospero Listening to the Night

  The End of Paradise

  The Lost World

  Maybe Very Happy

  The Manger of Incidentals

  The Thirty Favorite Lives: Amager

  Burma

  What I’ve Got

  Trouble

  In the Beginning

  Métier

  Yelapa

  A Taste for Grit and Whatever

  Maybe She Is Here

  THE DANCE MOST OF ALL [2009]

  Everywhere and Forever

  Painting on Plato’s Wall

  Alyosha

  Winter in the Night Fields

  Ovid in Tears

  The Spell Cast Over

  South

  Neglecting the Kids

  Dreaming at the Ballet

  Elegy

  After Love

  Waiting and Finding

  Winter Happiness in Greece

  Meanwhile

  The Abundant Little

  Worth

  Perfected

  Living Hungry After

  The Mistake

  A Fact

  Becoming Regardless

  The Secret

  The New Bride Almost Visible in Latin

  The Danger of Wisdom

  Searching for It in a Guadalajara Dance Hall

  Triangulating

  The Difficult Beauty

  Growing Up in Pittsburgh

  Infectious

  Piecing of the Life

  Not Easily

  Crossing the Border, Searching for the City

  Crusoe on the Mountain Gathering Faggots

  Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

  Going Home

  Getting It Right

  Aloneness

  Feeling History

  To Know the Invisible

  Prospero Goes Home

  Naked Without Intent

  Trying

  The Answer

  The Gros Ventre

  Waking at Night

  Cherishing What Isn’t

  Valley of the Spirits

  Suddenly Adult

  We Are the Junction

  UNCOLLECTED POEMS

  Valley of the Owls

  This Times That

  Spring

  A Man in Black and White

  Winter Happiness

  May I, May I

  The Winnowing

  Thirty Favorite Times

  Blinded by Seeing

  The Greek Gods Don’t Come in Winter

  The Cargo and the Equity

  The Stockton Tunnel

  Holding On to My Friend

  Secrets of Poetry

  Ars poetica

  Meniscus: Or How the Heart Must Not Be Too Much Questioned

  The Companion

  The Ring

  Lust

  The Sixth Meditation: Faces of God

  Convalescing

  Notes

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  A Note About The Author

  Other Books by This Author

  VIEWS OF

  JEOPARDY

  [1962]

  IN DISPRAISE OF POETRY

  When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,

  he gave him a beautiful white elephant.

  The miracle beast deserved such ritual

  that to care for him properly meant ruin.

  Yet to care for him improperly was worse.

  It appears the gift could not be refused.

  PERSPECTIVE HE WOULD MUTTER GOING TO BED

  For Robert Duncan

  “Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed.

  “Oh che dolce cosa è questa

  prospettiva.” Uccello. Bird.

  And I am as greedy of her, that the black

  horse of the literal world might come

  directly on me. Perspective. A place

  to stand. To receive. A place to go

  into from. The earth by language.

  Who can imagine antelope silent

  under the night rain, the Gulf

  at Biloxi at night else? I remember

  in Mexico a man and a boy painting

  an adobe house magenta and crimson

  who thought they were painting it red. Or pretty.

  So neither saw the brown mountains

  move to manage that great house.

  The horse wades in the city of grammar.

  ELEPHANTS

  For Jean McLean

  The great foreign trees and turtles burn<
br />
  as Pharos, demanding my house continue ahead.

  In my blood all night the statues counsel return.

  I walk my mornings in hope of tigers that yearn

  for absolute orchards and the grace of rivers, but instead

  the great foreign trees and turtles burn

  down my life, driving my hands from the fern

  of tenderness that crippled and stopped the Roman bed

  in my blood. All night the statues counsel return

  even so, gesturing toward Cézanne and stern

  styles of voyaging broken and blessed. “It is the dead

  the great foreign trees and turtles burn

  to momentary brilliance,” they say. “Such as earn

  their heat only from the violation they wed.”

  In my blood all night the statues counsel return

  to the measure that passionate Athenian dancers learn.

  But though I assent, the worn elephants that bred

  the great foreign trees and turtles burn

  in my blood all night the statues, counsel, return.

  AND SHE WAITING

  Always I have been afraid

  of this moment:

  of the return to love

  with perspective.

  I see these breasts

  with the others.

  I touch this mouth

  and the others.

  I command this heart

  as the others.

  I know exactly

  what to say.

  Innocence has gone

  out of me.

  The song.

  The song, suddenly,

  has gone out

  of me.

  IT MAY BE NO ONE SHOULD BE OPENED

  You know I am serious about the whales.

  Their moving vast through that darkness,

  silent.

  It is intolerable.

  Or Crivelli, with his fruit.

  The Japanese.

  Or the white flesh of casaba melons

  always in darkness.

  That darkness unopened from the beginning.

  The small emptiness at the middle

  in darkness.

  As virgins.

  The landscape unlighted.

  Lighted by me.

  Lighted as my hands

  in the darkroom

  pinching film on the spindle

  in absolute dark.

  The work difficult

  and my hands soon large and brilliant.

  Virgins.

  Whales.

  Darkness and Lauds.

  But it may be that no one should be opened.

  The deer come back to the feeding station

  at the suddenly open season.

  The girls find second loves.

  Semele was blasted

  looking on the whale

  in even his lesser panoply.

  It was the excellent Socrates ruined Athens.

  Now you have fallen crazy

  and I have run away.

 

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