by Jack Gilbert
Allen wearing a red skullcap, and a loose bathrobe
over his nakedness. Shoulder-length hair
and a chest-length, oily beard.
No one was within fifteen years of him. Destroyed
like the rest of that clan. His remarkable
talent destroyed. The fine mind grown more
and more simple. Buddhist chants, impoverishing
poems. There are no middle tones in the paintings
of children. Chekhov said he didn’t want
the audience to cry, but to see. Allen showing
me his old man’s bald scalp. A kind of love.
Aachen is a good copy of a mediocre building.
Architects tried for two thousand years to find
a way to put a dome on a square base.
ELEGY FOR BOB (JEAN MCLEAN)
Only you and I still stand in the snow on Highland Avenue
in Pittsburgh waiting for the blundering iron streetcars
that never came. Only you know how the immense storms
over the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers were the scale
I wanted. Nobody but you remembers Peabody High School.
You shared my youth in Paris and the hills above Como.
And later, in Seattle. It was you playing the aria from
Don Giovanni over and over, filling the forest of Puget
Sound with the music. You in the front room and me
upstairs with your discarded wife in my bed. The sound
of your loneliness pouring over our happy bodies.
You were with your third wife when I was in Perugia
six months later, but in love with somebody else.
We searched for her in Munich, the snow falling again.
You trying to decide when to kill yourself. All of it
finally bringing us to San Francisco. To the vast
decaying white house. No sound of Mozart coming up
from there. No alleluias in you anymore. No longer
will you waltz under the chandeliers in Paris salons
drunk with champagne and the Greek girl as the others
stand along the mirrored walls. The men watching
with fury, the eyes of the women inscrutable. No one
else speaks the language of those years. No one
remembers you as the Baron. The streetcars have
finished the last run, and I am walking home. Thinking
love is not refuted because it comes to an end.
RÉSUMÉ
Easter on the mountain. The hanging goat roasted
with lemon, pepper and thyme. The American hacks off
the last of the meat, gets out the remaining
handfuls from the spine. Grease up to the elbows,
his face smeared and his heart blooming. The satisfied
farmers watch his fervor with surprise.
When the day begins to cool, he makes his way down
the trails. Down from that holiday energy
to the silence of his real life, where he will
wash in cold water by kerosene light, happy
and alone. A future inch by inch, rock by rock,
by the green wheat and the ripe wheat later.
By basil and dove tower and white doves turning
in the brilliant sky. The ghosts of his other world
crowding around, surrounding him with himself.
Tomato by tomato, canned fish in the daily stew.
He sits outside on the wall of his vineyard
as night rises from the parched earth and the sea
darkens in the distance. Insistent stars and him
singing in the quiet. Flesh of the spirit and soul
of the body. The clarity that does so much damage.
MORE THAN SIXTY
Out of money, so I’m sitting in the shade
of my farmhouse cleaning the lentils
I found in the back of the cupboard.
Listening to the cicada in the fig tree
mix with the cooing doves on the roof.
I look up when I hear a goat hurt far down
the valley and discover the sea
exactly the same blue I used to paint it
with my watercolors as a child.
So what, I think happily. So what!
BY SMALL AND SMALL:
MIDNIGHT TO FOUR A.M.
For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.
ONCE UPON A TIME
We were young incidentally, stumbling
into joy, he said. The sweetness of
our bodies was natural in the way
the sun came out of the Mediterranean
fresh every morning. We were accidentally
alive. A shape without a form.
We were a music composed of melody,
without chords, played only on
the white keys. We thought excitement
was love, that intensity was a marriage.
We meant no harm, but could see the women
only a little through the ardor and hurry.
We were innocent, he said, baffled when
they let us kiss their tender mouths.
Sometimes they kissed back, even volunteered.
A CLOSE CALL
Dusk and the sea is thus and so. The cat
from two fields away crossing through the grapes.
It is so quiet I can hear the air
in the canebrake. The blond wheat darkens.
The glaze is gone from the bay and the heat lets go.
They have not lit the lamp at the other farm yet
and all at once I feel lonely. What a surprise.
But the air stills, the heat comes back
and I think I am all right again.
THE ROOSTER
They have killed the rooster, thank God,
but it’s strange to have my half
of the valley unreported. Without the rooster
it’s like my place by the Chinese Elm is not here
each day. As though I’m gone. I touch my face
and get up to make tea, feeling my heart claim
no territory. Like the colorless weeds which fail,
but don’t give in. Silent in the world’s clamor.
They killed the rooster because he could feel
nothing for the six frumpy hens. Now there is only
the youngster to announce and cover. They are only
aunts to him. Mostly he works on his crowing. And for
a long time the roosters on the other farms would not
answer. But yesterday they started laying
full-throated performances on him. He would come
back, but couldn’t get the hang of it. The scorn
and the failing went on until finally one day,
from the other end of the valley, came a deep
voice saying, “For Christ’s sake, kid, like this.”
And it began. Not bothering to declare parts
of the landscape, but announcing the glory,
the greatness of the sun and moon.
Told of the heavenly hosts, the mysteries,
and the joy. Which were the Huns and which not.
Describing the dominions of wind and song. What was
noble in all things. It was very quiet after that.
FAILING AND FLYING
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
BURNING (ANDANTE NON TROPPO)
We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
at his own speed. Each is the product
of his spirit’s refraction, of the inflection
of that mind. It is the pace of our living
that makes the world available. Regardless of
the body’s lion-wrath or forest waiting, despite
the mind’s splendid appetite or the sad power
in our soul’s separation from God and women,
it is always our gait of being that decides
how much is seen, what the mystery of us knows,
and what the heart will smell of the landscape
as the Mexican train continues at a dog-trot each
day going north. The grand Italian churches are
covered with detail which is visible at the pace
people walk by. The great modern buildings are
blank because there is no time to see from the car.
A thousand years ago when they built the gardens
of Kyoto, the stones were set in the streams askew.
Whoever went quickly would fall in. When we slow,
the garden can choose what we notice. Can change
our heart. On the wall of a toilet in Rock Springs
years ago there was a dispenser that sold tubes of
cream to numb a man’s genitals. Called Linger.
THE OTHER PERFECTION
Nothing here. Rock and fried earth.
Everything destroyed by the fierce light.
Only stones and small fields of
stubborn barley and lentils. No broken
things to repair. Nothing thrown away
or abandoned. If you want a table,
you pay a man to make it. If you find two
feet of barbed wire, you take it home.
You’ll need it. The farmers don’t laugh.
They go to town to laugh, or to fiestas.
A kind of paradise. Everything itself.
The sea is water. Stones are made of rock.
The sun goes up and goes down. A success
without any enhancement whatsoever.
A BALL OF SOMETHING
Watching the ant walk underwater along
the bottom of my saucepan is painful.
Though he seems in no distress.
He walks at leisure, almost strolling.
Lifts his head twice in the solid outside
and goes on. Until he encounters a bit
of something and acts almost afraid
in struggling to get free. After, he continues,
again at ease. He looks up and pitches forward
into a tight ball. It is not clear whether
that’s the end. Perhaps he is doing what
the hedgehog does well. Waiting for someone
to go by whose ankle he can grab
and ask for help. Hoping for pity. But maybe
not. Maybe he lies there curled around a smile,
liberated at last. Dreaming of coming back
as Byron, or maybe the favorite dog.
GETTING AWAY WITH IT
We have already lived in the real paradise.
Horses in the empty summer street.
Me eating the hot wurst I couldn’t afford,
in frozen Munich, tears dropping. We can
remember. A child in the outfield waiting
for the last fly ball of the year. So dark
already it was black against heaven.
The voices trailing away to dinner,
calling faintly in the immense distance.
Standing with my hands open, watching it
curve over and start down, turning white
at the last second. Hands down. Flourishing.
TRUTH
The glare of the Greek sun
on our stone house
is not so white
as the pale moonlight on it.
TRANSGRESSIONS
He thinks about how important the sinning was,
how much his equity was in simply being alive.
Like the sloth. The days and nights wasted,
doing nothing important adding up to
the favorite years. Long hot afternoons
watching ants while the cicadas railed
in the Chinese Elm about the brevity of life.
Indolence so often when no one was watching.
Wasting June mornings with the earth singing
all around. Autumn afternoons doing nothing
but listening to the siren voices of streams
and clouds coaxing him into the sweet happiness
of leaving all of it alone. Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting
the future. Content to let the garden fail
and the house continue on in its usual disorder.
Yes, and coveting his neighbors’ wives.
Their clean hair and soft voices. The seraphim
he was sure were in one of the upstairs rooms.
Hesitant occasions of pride, feeling himself feeling.
Waking in the night and lying there. Discovering
the past in the wonderful stillness. The other,
older pride. Watching the ambulance take away
the man whose throat he had crushed. Above all,
his greed. Greed of time, of being. This world,
the pine woods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in the winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.
THE ABANDONED VALLEY
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
HAPPENING APART FROM WHAT’S
HAPPENING AROUND IT
There is a vividness to eleven years of love
because it is over. A clarity of Greece now
because I live in Manhattan or New England.
If what is happening is part of what’s going on
around what’s occurring, it is impossible
to know what is truly happening. If love is
part of the passion, part of the fine food
or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not
clear what the love is. When I was walking
in the mountains with the Japanese man and began
to hear the water, he said, “What is the sound
of the waterfall?” “Silence,” he finally told me.
The stillness I did not notice until the sound
of water falling made apparent the silence I had
been hearing long before. I ask myself what
is the sound of women?
What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,
the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still
in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper
down where a woman’s heart is holding its breath,
where something very far away in that body
is becoming something we don’t have a name for.
EXCEEDING THE SPIRIT
Beyond what the fires have left of the cathedral
you can see old men standing here and there
in administration buildings looking out
of the fine casements with the glass gone.
Idle and bewildered. The few people who are
in the weed-choked streets below carry things
without purpose, holding fading memories inside
of what the good used to be. Immense ships
rise in the distance, beached and dying.
Starving men crouch in the dirt of the plaza with
a scrap of cloth before them, trying to sell nothing:
one with dead fuses and a burnt-out light bulb,
another with just a heavy bolt and screw
rusted together. One has two Byzantine coins
and a lump of oxidation which has a silver piece
inside stamped with the face of Hermes, but he
doesn’t know it. A strange place to look for
what matters, what is worthy. To arrive now
at the wilderness alone and striving harder
for discontent, to need again. Not for salvation.
To go on because there might be something like him.
To visit what is importantly unknown of what is.
MEDITATION ELEVEN:
READING BLAKE AGAIN
I remember that house I’d rented with them.
The laughing and constant talk of love.
The energy of their friends.
And the sounds late at night.
The sound of whipping. Urging and screams.
Like the dead lying to each other.
HOW MUCH OF THAT IS LEFT IN ME?
Yearning inside the rejoicing. The heart’s famine
within the spirit’s joy. Waking up happy