by Jack Gilbert
The sky
on and on,
stone.
The Mediterranean
down the cliff,
stone.
These fields,
rock.
Dead weeds
everywhere.
And the weight
of sun.
In the weeds
an old woman
lifting off
snails.
Near
two trees
of ripe figs.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.
POETRY IS A KIND OF LYING
Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.
Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.
Degas said he didn’t paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had.
FOR EXAMPLE
For example, that fragment of entablature
in the Museo delle Terme. It continues
giant forever. Without seasons.
Ambergris of the Latin whale.
For years he dealt with it, month by month
in his white room above Perugia
while thousands of swifts turned
in the structures of sun with a sound like glass.
Strained to accommodate it
in the empty streets of Rome. Singing
according to whether bells preempted the dark
or rain ordered the earth. And even now,
like Kurtz, he crawls toward the lethal merit.
THE SIRENS AGAIN
What are we to do about loveliness? We get past
that singing early and reach an honest severity.
We all were part of the Children’s Crusade: trusted,
were sold bad boats, and went under. But we still
dream of the voices. Not to go back. Thinking
to go on even into the confusion of pleasure.
We hear them carol at night and do not mind the lies,
intending to come on those women from inland.
ALBA
After a summer with happy people,
I rush back, scared, gulping
down pain wherever I can get it.
OSTINATO RIGORE
As slowly as possible, I said,
and we went into paradise.
Rushes alternate with floating islands
of tomatoes. Stretches of lily pads
and then lotus. The kingfishers
flash and go into the lake,
making a sound in the silence.
After, I can hear her breathing.
The Japanese built gardens eight
hundred years ago as a picture
of the Pure Land, because people
could not imagine a happy life.
My friend lives on the Delaware River
and fashions Eden out of burned
buildings that were the Automats
of his youth in New York.
Another designs a country
with justice for everyone.
I know a woman who makes heaven
out of her body. I lie in the smell
of water, with the sun going down,
trying to figure out this painful
model I have carpentered together.
A BIRD SINGS TO ESTABLISH FRONTIERS
Perhaps if we could begin some definite way.
At a country inn of the old Russian novels,
maybe. A contrived place to establish manner.
With roles of traditional limit for distance.
I might be going back, and there would be a pause.
Late at night, while they changed the horses on your sled.
Or prepared my room. An occasion to begin.
Though not on false terms. I am not looking for love.
I have what I can manage, and too many claims.
Just a formal conversation, with no future.
But I must explain that I will probably cry.
It is important you ignore it. I am fine.
I am not interested in discussing it.
It is complicated and not amiable.
The sort of thing our arrangements provide against.
There should be a fireplace. Brandy, and some cigars.
Or cheese with warm crackers. Anything that permits
the exercise of incidental decorum:
deferring to the other’s preceding, asking
for a light. Vintages. It does not matter what.
The fireplace is to allow a different grace.
And there will be darkness above new snow outside.
Even if we agree on a late afternoon,
there would still be snow. Inside, the dining room must
have a desolate quality. So we can talk
without raising our voices. Finally, I hope
it is understood we are not to meet again.
And that both of us are men, so all that other
is avoided. We can speak and preserve borders.
The tears are nothing. The real sorrow is for that
old dream of nobility. All those gentlemen.
BARTLEBY AT THE WALL
The wall
is the side of a building.
Maybe seventy-five feet high.
The rope is tied
below the top
and hangs down thirty feet.
Just hangs down.
Above the slum lot.
It’s been there a long time.
One part
below the middle
is frayed.
I’ve been at this all month.
Trying to see the rope.
The wall.
Carefully looking
at the bricks.
Seeing they are
umber and soot
and the color of tongue.
Even counting them.
But it’s like Poussin.
Too clear.
The way things aren’t.
So I try not staring.
Not grabbing.
Allowing it to come.
But just at the point
where I’d see,
the mind gives a little
skip
and I’m already past.
To all this sorrow again.
Considering
the skip between wildness
and affection,
where everything is.
TWO—[MONOLITHOS]—1982
ALL THE WAY FROM THERE TO HERE
From my hill I look down on the freeway and over
to a gull lifting black against the gray ridge.
It lifts slowly higher and enters the bright sky.
Surely our long, steady dying brings us to a state
of grace. What else can I call this bafflement?
From here I deal with my irrelevance to love.
With the bewildering tenderness of which I am
composed. The sun goes down and comes up again.
The moon comes up and goes down. I live
with the morning air and the different airs of night.
I begin to grow old.
The ships put out and are lost.
Put out and are lost.
Leaving me with their haunting awkwardness
and the imperfection of birds. While all the time
I work to understand this happiness I have come into.
What I remember of my nine-story fall
down through the great fir is the rush of green.
And the softness of my regret in the ambulance going
to my nearby death, looking out at the trees leaving me.
What I remember of my crushed spine
is seeing Linda faint again and again,
sliding down the white X‑ray room wall
as my sweet body flailed on the steel table
unable to manage the bulk of pain. That
and waiting in the years after for the burning
in my fingertips, which would announce,
the doctors said, the beginning of paralysis.
What I remember best of the four years of watching
in Greece and Denmark and London and Greece is Linda
making lunch. Her blondeness and ivory coming up
out of the blue Aegean. Linda walking with me daily
across the island from Monolithos to Thíra and back.
That’s what I remember most of death:
the gentleness of us in that bare Greek Eden,
the beauty as the marriage steadily failed.
NOT PART OF LITERATURE
Monolithos was four fisherman huts along the water,
a miniature villa closed for years, and our farmhouse
a hundred feet behind. Hot fields of barley, grapes,
and tomatoes stretching away three flat miles
to where the rest of the island used to be.
Where the few people live above the great cliffs.
A low mountain to the south and beyond that the earth
filled with pictures of Atlantis. On our wrong side
of the island were no people, cars, plumbing, or lights.
The summer skies and Mediterranean constantly. No trees.
Me cleaning squid. Linda getting up from a chair.
TRYING TO BE MARRIED
Watching my wife out in the full moon,
the sea bright behind her across the field
and through the trees. Eight years
and her love for me quieted away.
How fine she is. How hard we struggle.
REGISTRATION
Where the worms had opened the owl’s chest,
he could see, inside her frail ribs,
the city of Byzantium. Exquisitely made
of ironwood and brass. The pear trees around
the harem and the warships were perfectly detailed.
No wonder they make that mewing sound, he thought,
calling to each other among the dark arbors
while the cocks crow and answer and a farther
rooster answers that: the sound proceeding
up the mountain, paling and thinning until
it is transparent, like the faint baying of hounds.
MORE THAN FRIENDS
I was walking through the harvested fields
tonight and got thinking about age.
Began wondering if my balance was gone.
So there I was out in the starlight
on one foot, swaying, and cheating.
THAT TENOR OF WHICH THE NIGHT BIRDS ARE A VEHICLE
The great light within the blackness shines out
as the cry of owls and tranced signaling of nightjars.
Birds who are vast cloud-chambers of the place I am
in my bright condition, a neighborhood I am the darkness of.
It should come from me as song and new flying
between the pale olive trees. But the calling of birds
in the silent dim fields is a translation I fail at,
despite the steady gladness where I have made landfall.
I go without audible music, flying heavily
from stone to stone in order to nest in marble.
Failing the harking, missing the hawking. Not managing
as a bird. Struggling through my career, blindly testing
the odor of all that whiteness night after night:
not sure if the old piss-smell is the scent of gods,
and knowing even that faint clue is fading as I hesitate.
WALKING HOME ACROSS THE ISLAND
Walking home across the plain in the dark.
And Linda crying. Again we have come
to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon
does not rise. We have only each other,
but I am shouting inside the rain
and she is crying like a wounded animal,
knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard
to understand how we could be brought here by love.
MISTRUST OF BRONZE
The sun is perfect, but it makes no nightingales sing.
The violence of light suppresses color in these fields,
its glare masking the green of the white grapes
and masking the heavy purple. Just as the moon now
finds no tinge in the giant oleander. Perhaps it is
bronze models for the spirit that endanger us.
I think of my years on the Greyhound bus, living with
the blank earth under the American sun day after day.
Leaking away into those distances. Waxing again
in the night while everyone slept and I watched
the old snow by the fences just after the headlights.
I used to blur in the dark thinking of the long counter
at Rock Springs day after tomorrow, my pleasure
of hunger merging with the bad food.
Memories make me grainy and distinct somewhere. Where
night shudders with a black fire of which Dante tells.
I begin the long inaccuracy alone.
Loneliness, they report, is a man’s fate.
A man’s fate, said Heraclitus, is his character.
I sit masturbating in the moonlight,
trying to find means for all of it.
The sea collapses, again and again, faintly behind me.
I walk down the dirt road, touch the cold Aegean,
and come back slowly. My hand drying in the night air.
ANGELUS
Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels.
Which only we can translate into flesh.
The language to which we alone are native.
Our own bait. We are spirits housed in meat,
instantly opaque to the Lord. As Jesus.
We go into the deadfall of the body,
our hearts in their marvelous cases,
and discover new belfries everywhere.
I continued toward the Minotaur to keep
the thread taut. And suddenly, now,
immense flowers are coloring all
my stalked body. Making wine of me.
As bells get music of metal in the rain.
The prey I am willingly prospers.
The exile that comes on comes too late.
I go to it as Adam, singing across paradise.
A KIND OF WORLD
Things that are themselves. Waves water, the rocks
stone. The smell of her arms. Stillness. Windstorms.
The long silence again. The well. The rabbit. Heat.
Nipples and long thighs. Her heavy bright mane.
Plunging water flashing as she washes her body in the sun.
“Perfect in whiteness.” Light going away every evening
like some great importance. Grapes outside the windows.
Linda talking less and less. Going down to the sea
while she sleeps. Standing in the cold water to my mouth
just before morning. Linda saying late in the day
we should eat now or it would be too dark to wash the dishes.
She going out quietly afterward to scream into the wind
from the ocean. Coming in. Lighting the lamps.
LEAVING MONOLITHOS
They were cutting the spring barley by fistfuls
when we came. Boys drove horses and mules over it
all day in threshing pits under the powerful sky.
They came from their white village on the horizon
for tomatoes in June. And later for grapes.
Now they are plowing in the cold wind. Yesterday
I
burned my papers by the wall. This morning I look
back at the lone, shuttered farmhouse. Sun rising
over the volcano. At the full moon above the sea.
DIVORCE
Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Rushed through the dark house.
Stopped, remembering. Stood looking
out at the bright moonlight on concrete.
REMEMBERING MY WIFE
I see them in black and white as they wait,
severely happy, in the sunlight of Thermopylae.
As Iseult and Beatrice are always black and white.
I imagine Helen in light, not hue. In my dreams,
Nausicaä is blanched colorless by noon.
And Botticelli’s Simonetta comes as faint tints of air.
Cleopatra is in color almost to the end.
Like Linda’s blondeness dyed by flowers and the sea.
I loved that wash of color, but remember her
mostly black and white. Mark Antony listening
to Hercules abandoning him listened in the dark.
In that finer time of day. In the essence, not the mode.
PEWTER
Thrushes flying under the lake. Nightingales singing underground.
Yes, my King. Paris hungry and leisurely just after the war. Yes.
America falling into history. Yes. Those silent winter afternoons
along the Seine when I was always alone. Yes, my King. Rain
everywhere in the forests of Pennsylvania as the king’s coach
lumbered and was caught and all stood gathered close
while the black trees went on and on. Ah, my King,
it was the sweet time of our lives: the rain shining on their faces,
the loud sound of rain around. Like the nights we waited,
knowing she was probably warm and moaning under someone else.
That cold mansard looked out over the huge hospital of the poor
and far down on Paris, gray and beautiful under the February rain.
Between that and this. That yes and this yes. Between, my King,
that forgotten girl, forgotten pain, and the consequence.