by Jack Gilbert
was blue just then at the end of the valley,
and is blue now differently.
THEORETICAL LIVES
All that remains from the work of Skopas
are the feet. Sometimes not even that.
Sometimes only irregularities on the plinth
that may indicate how the figure stood.
Using the feet, or shadows of feet,
and the exact diagrams of German professors,
learned men argue about what the arms
were doing and how good the sculpture was.
As we do with our lives, guessing whether
the woman was truly happy when it rained
and if her father was really the ambassador.
Whether she was passionate or just wanted to please.
FROM THESE NETTLES, ALMS
They dragged me down. Down the muddy hill
with me frantically digging in my heels,
grabbing at bushes and weeds. Kicking
and bellowing, I was pulled down and under
the bridge. Dead for sure, I thought,
now that I was out of sight. They had me on
my back and were stomping, driving in
their heavy shoes and hurting me
with their fists. Me yelling no! no! no!
and twisting away, furious. And them,
furious, trying to kill me now because
I was too dumb to give in. Afterward,
sitting at the bus stop cleaning off
the blood, something in me wanted to know
what I was like in the middle of it,
down there under the bridge.
HOT NIGHTS IN FLORIDA
The woman is asleep in the bedroom. The fan is making
its sound and the television is on behind him
with the sound off. The chuck-will’s-widow is calling
in the scrub across the asphalt road. Farther on,
the people are asleep in their one-story houses
with the lawn outside and the boat in the driveway.
He is thinking of the British Museum. These children
drive fast when they are awake. Twenty years ago
this was a swamp with alligators and no shape.
He is thinking of the Danish cold that forced him
into the gypsy girl’s bed. Like walking through
a door and finding Venezia when he thought he was
in Yugoslavia. The people here seem hardly here
at all: blond desire always in the middle of
air conditioning. He remembers love as it could be.
Outside, the moon is shining on nothing in particular.
GETTING IT ALL
The air this morning is pleasant and praises nothing.
It lies easily on each thing. The light has no agency.
In this kind of world, we are on our own: the plain
black shoes of a man sitting in the doorway,
pleats of the tall woman’s blue skirt as she hurries
to an office farther on. We will notice maybe
the gold-leaf edges of a book carried by the student
glinting intermittently as she crosses into the bright
sunlight on our side of the street. But usually
we depend on meditation and having things augmented.
We see the trees in their early-spring greenness,
but not again until just before winter. The common
is mostly beyond us. Love after the fervor, the wife
after three thousand nights. It is easy to realize
the horses suddenly running through an empty alley.
But marriage is clear. Like the faint sound of a cello
very late at night somewhere below in the stillness
of an old building on a street named Gernesgade.
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
I light the lamp and look at my watch.
Four-thirty. Tap out my shoes
because of the scorpions, and go out
into the field. Such a sweet night.
No moon, but urgent stars. Go back inside
and make hot chocolate on my butane burner.
I search around with the radio through
the skirl of the Levant. “Tea for Two”
in German. Finally, Cleveland playing
the Rams in the rain. It makes me feel
acutely here and everybody somewhere else.
LEPORELLO ON DON GIOVANNI
Do you think it’s easy for him, the poor bastard?
To be that weak whenever their music begins?
It’s not a convenient delight, not a tempered scale.
Not a choice. As Saint Francis had no choice,
needing to be walled up in his stone cell all winter.
To be flogged through Assisi naked and foul.
God is not optional when faith is like that.
But Francis had a vocation, not a need for silly women.
Giovanni really believes they are important.
Talks about them as parallel systems. Crazy stuff.
An educated gentleman of the finest family
wandering off helplessly after their faintest glimmer.
He believes there is a secret melded with the ladies.
He smiles and nods all evening as he listens
to their chatter and the whining about their husbands.
He says the world changes because of them.
Their flesh unfolds and he goes through to something
beyond the flesh. Hears a voice, he says.
A primitive radio at the core of them.
Growing and fading, as though it comes from the moon.
FIRST TIMES
I had not seen her for twenty years when she called
to welcome me back to America, wanting to see me.
Warning that she was past forty now and the mother
of a seven-year-old. The lost time flooded me.
Paris and me without money or a place to take her.
I borrowed a room and lit candles and had wine.
It went badly. My knees kept sliding away under me
on the starched sheets. I managed the humiliation
by turning my back and refusing to talk. She was
as young as I was and felt, I suspect, relief.
HALF THE TRUTH
The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies
are white all day. The Canadian geese fly over
high up in the moonlight with the lonely sound
of their discontent. Going south. Now the rains
and soon the snow. The black trees are leafless,
the flowers gone. Only cabbages are left
in the bedraggled garden. Truth becomes visible,
the architecture of the soul begins to show through.
God has put off his panoply and is at home with us.
We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty.
We have resumed our lives. There is no hurry now.
We make love without rushing and find ourselves
afterward with someone we know well. Time to be
what we are getting ready to be next. This loving,
this relishing, our gladness, this being puts down
roots and comes back again year after year.
RESPECT
For Albert Schweitzer
This morning I found a baby scorpion,
perfect, in the saucepan.
Killed it with a piece of marble.
THE LIVES OF FAMOUS MEN
Trying to scrape the burned soup from my only pan
with a spoon after midnight by oil lamp
because if I do not cook the mackerel
this hot night it will kill me tomorrow
in the vegetable stew. Which is twice
wasteful. Though it would be another way
of cutting down, I am thinking, as I go out to get
more water from the well and happen to look up
; through the bright stars. Yes, yes, I say,
and go on pulling at the long rope.
GETTING OLD
The soft wind comes sweet in the night
on the mountain. Invisible except for
the sound it makes in the big poplars outside
and the feel on his naked, single body,
which breathes quietly a little before dawn,
eyes open and in love with the table
and chair in the transparent dark and stars
in the other window. Soon it will be time
for the first tea and cool pear and then
the miles down and miles up the mountain.
“Old and alone,” he thinks, smiling.
Full of what abundance has done to his spirit.
Feeling around inside to see if his heart
is still, thank God, ambitious. The way
old men look in their eyes each morning.
Knowing she isn’t there and how much Michiko
isn’t anywhere. The eyes close as he remembers
seeing the big owl on the roof last night
for the first time after hearing it for months.
Thinking how much he has grown unsuited
for love the size it is for him. “But maybe
not,” he says. And the eyes open as he
grins at the heart’s stubborn pretending.
HOW TO LOVE THE DEAD
She lives, the bird says, and means nothing
silly. She is dead and available,
the fox says, knowing about the spirits.
Not the picture at the funeral,
not the object of grieving. She is dead
and you can have that, he says. If you can
love without politeness or delicacy,
the fox says, love her with your wolf heart.
As the dead are to be desired.
Not the way long marriages are,
nothing happening again and again.
Not in the woods or in the fields.
Not in the cities. The painful love of being
permanently unhoused. Not color, but the stain.
ALMOST HAPPY
The goldfish is dead this morning on the bottom
of her world. The autumn sky is white,
the trees are coming apart in the cold rain.
Loneliness gets closer and closer.
He drinks hot tea and sings off-key:
This train ain’t a going-home train, this train.
This is not a going-home train, this train.
This train ain’t a going-home train ’cause
my home’s on a gone-away train. That train.
REFUSING
HEAVEN
[2005]
A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
NAKED EXCEPT FOR THE JEWELRY
“And,” she said, “you must talk no more
about ecstasy. It is a loneliness.”
The woman wandered about picking up
her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”
the man said. “We tell lies,” she said,
brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”
“You were helpless with joy,” he said,
“moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said,
“we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.
The heart lies to itself because it must.”
PUT HER IN THE FIELDS FOR KINDNESS
The door was in the whitewashed eight-foot walls
of the narrow back street common to Greek islands.
Beautiful light and shade in the clear air.
The big iron bolt was on the outside locking
something in. Some days the pounding inside
made the heavy wooden door shudder. Often a voice
screaming. The crazy old woman, people said.
She would hurt the children if they let her out.
Pinch them or scare them, they said.
Sometimes everything was still and I would delay
until I heard the tiny whimper that meant she knew
I was there. Late one afternoon on my way for oil,
the door was broken. She was in the lot opposite
in weeds by the wall, her dress pulled up, pissing.
Like a cow. Able to manage, quiet in the last light.
WHAT SONG SHOULD WE SING
The massive overhead crane comes
when we wave to it, lets down
its heavy claws and waits tamely
within its power while we hook up
the slabs of three-quarter-inch
steel. Takes away the ponderous
reality when we wave again.
What name do we have for that?
What song is there for its voice?
What is the other face of Yahweh?
The god who made the slug and ferret,
the maggot and shark in his image.
What is the carol for that?
Is it the song of nevertheless,
or of the empire of our heart? We carry
language as our mind, but are we
the dead whale that sinks grandly
for years to reach the bottom of us?
HAVING THE HAVING
For Gianna
I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember. They are not pictures
of what was. Not accounts of dusk
amid the olive trees and that odor.
The walking back was the arriving.
For that there are three knots
and a space and another two
close together. They do not imitate
the inside of her body, nor her clean
mouth. They cannot describe, but they
can prevent remembering it wrong.
The knots recall. The knots
are blazons marking the trail
back to what we own and imperfectly
forget. Back to a bell ringing
far off, and the sweet summer darkening.
All but a little of it blurs and leaks
away, but that little is most of it,
even damaged. Two more knots
and then just straight string.
SAY YOU LOVE ME
Are the angels of her bed the angels
who come near me alone in mine?
Are the green trees in her window
the color I see in ripe plums?
If she always sees backward
and upside down without knowing it
what chance do we have? I am haunted
by the feeling that she is saying
melting lords of death, avalanches,
rivers and moments of passing through.
And I am replying, “Yes, yes.
Shoes and pudding.”
KUNSTKAMMER
We are resident inside with the machinery,
a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.
We exist with a wind whispering inside
and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,
inside the basilica of bones. The flesh
is a neighborhood, but not the life.
Our body is not good at memory, at keeping.
It is the spirit that holds on to our treasure.
The dusk in Italy when the ferry passed Bellagio
and turned across Lake Como in the hush to where
we would land and start up the grassy mountain.
The body keeps so little of the life after
being with her eleven years,
and the mouth not even that much. But the heart
is different. It never forgets
the pine trees with the moon rising behind them
every night. Again and again we put our
sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed
them back into their death, each moving slowly
into the dark, disappearing as our hearts
visited and savored, hurt and yearned.
HALLOWEEN
There were a hundred wild people in Allen’s
three-story house. He was sitting at a small
table in the kitchen quietly eating something.
Alone, except for Orlovsky’s little brother
who was asleep with his face against the wall.