Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 14

by Jack Gilbert


  Where are you now? the one on the left says. With the ghosts.

  I am with Gianna those two years in Perugia. Meeting secretly

  in the thirteenth-century alleys of stone. Walking in the fields

  through the spring light, she well dressed and walking in heels

  over the plowed land. We are just outside the city walls

  hidden under the thorny blackberry bushes and her breasts naked.

  I am with her those many twilights in the olive orchards,

  holding the heart of her as she whimpers. Now where are you?

  he says. I am with Linda those years and years. In American

  cities, in København, on Greek islands season after season.

  Lindos and Monolithos and the other places. I am with Michiko

  for eleven years, East and West, holding her clear in my mind

  the way a native can hold all of his village at one moment.

  Where are you now? he says. I am standing on myself the way

  a bird sits in her nest, with the babies half asleep underneath

  and the world all leaves and morning air. What do you want?

  a blonde one asks. To keep what I already have, I say. You ask

  too much, he says sternly. Then you are at peace, she says.

  I am not at peace, I tell her. I want to fail. I am hungry

  for what I am becoming. What will you do? she asks. I will

  continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter.

  THE NEGLIGIBLE

  I lie in bed listening to it sing

  in the dark about the sweetness

  of brief love and the perfection of loves

  that might have been. The spirit cherishes

  the disregarded. It is because the body continues

  to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko

  that her body is so clear in me after all this time.

  There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine

  on her spoon merging with faint sounds

  in the distance of her rising from the bathwater.

  THE LOST HOTELS OF PARIS

  The Lord gives everything and charges

  by taking it back. What a bargain.

  Like being young for a while. We are

  allowed to visit hearts of women,

  to go into their bodies so we feel

  no longer alone. We are permitted

  romantic love with its bounty and half-life

  of two years. It is right to mourn

  for the small hotels of Paris that used to be

  when we used to be. My mansard looking

  down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,

  and me listening to the bell at night.

  Venice is no more. The best Greek islands

  have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having

  not the keeping that is the treasure.

  Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon

  and said he was giving up poetry

  because it told lies, that language distorts.

  I agreed, but asked what we have

  that gets it right even that much.

  We look up at the stars and they are

  not there. We see the memory

  of when they were, once upon a time.

  And that too is more than enough.

  FEATHERS OR LEAD

  Him, she said, and him. They put us in the second car

  and followed her back to the villa. Our fear slowly

  faded during the weeks. Everyone was kind but busy.

  We could go anywhere on the first floor

  and on the grounds this side of the fence.

  They decided on me and sent the other boy away.

  Before I had only glimpsed her at the upper windows.

  Now we ate together at opposite ends of the table.

  Candlelight eased her age, but not her guilt.

  Once she said the world was an astonishing animal:

  light was its spirit and noise was its mind.

  That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.

  Another time she warned me about walking on the lawns

  at night. Told me of heavy birds that flew after dark

  croaking, “Feathers or lead, stone or fire?”

  Mounting people who gave the wrong answer and riding

  them like horses across the whole county, beating them

  with their powerful wings. We would play cards

  silently on rainy days, and have sardine sandwiches

  at four in the morning, taking turns reading aloud

  from Tolstoy. “What need do we have for consulates?”

  she said once before going upstairs, the grand room

  beginning to fill with the dawn. “Why insist

  on nature? A flower must be red or white, but we

  can be anything. Our victories are difficult

  because the triumph is not in possessing excellence.

  It is found in reluctance.” Month after month

  we lived like that. And with me telling her

  what it was like out there among the living.

  She was steadily failing, like a Palladian palace

  coming apart gracefully. The last morning she stood

  by the tall windows. “I will not give you my blessing,”

  she said, “and I refuse you also my reasons. Who are you,

  who is anyone to make me just?” When they came for her,

  she smiled at me and said, “At last.”

  WHAT PLENTY

  Hitting each other. Backing up

  and hitting each other again

  in the loud silence of the stars

  and the roar of their headlights.

  Trying to force feeling and squeezing

  out pain. Eden built of iron and grit.

  Arcades fashioned entirely of guilt.

  Paradise of loss, of lipsticked nipples,

  lying to children about the soul.

  Dead women stuffed with flowers.

  Abandoned cabs in empty streets

  not listening to the red lights,

  yellow nor green.

  THE GARDEN

  We come from a deep forest of years

  into a valley of an unknown country

  called loneliness. Without horse or dog,

  the heavens bottomless overhead.

  We are like Marco Polo who came back

  with jewels hidden in the seams of his ragged clothes.

  A sweet sadness, a tough happiness.

  This beginner cobbles together a kind of house

  and makes lentil soup there night

  after night. Sits on the great stone

  that is a threshold, smelling pine trees

  in the hot darkness. When the moon rises

  between the tall trunks, he sings without

  talent but with pleasure. Then goes inside

  to make courtesy with his dear ghosts.

  In the morning, he watches the two nuthatches,

  the pair of finches with their new son.

  And the chickadees. There are chipmunks

  in the afternoon finding seeds between

  his fingers with their exquisite hands.

  He visits his misbegotten garden where

  the mint and chives flourish alongside

  the few stunted tomatoes and eggplants.

  They are scarce because of ignorance.

  He wonders all the time where

  he has arrived, why so much has been

  allowed him (even rain on the leaves

  of sugar maples), and why there is

  even now so much to come.

  MUSIC IS IN THE PIANO

  ONLY WHEN IT IS PLAYED

  We are not one with this world. We are not

  the complexity our body is, nor the summer air

  idling in the big maple without purpose.

  We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves

&nb
sp; as it passes through. We are not the wood

  any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage

  between the two. We are certainly not the lake

  nor the fish in it, but the something that is

  pleased by them. We are the stillness when

  a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices

  of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident

  when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part

  of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists

  only in the singing, and is not the singer.

  God does not live among the church bells,

  but is briefly resident there. We are occasional

  like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed

  with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold

  on to the enterprise underway in our chest.

  Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what

  walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat

  and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

  He continues past the nunnery to the old villa

  where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides

  touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,

  which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

  WINNING ON THE BLACK

  The silence is so complete he can hear

  the whispers inside him. Mostly names

  of women. Women gone or dead. The ones

  we loved so easily. What is it, he wonders,

  that we had then and don’t have now,

  that we once were and are no longer.

  It seemed natural to be alive back then.

  Soon there will be only the raccoon’s

  tracks in the snow down by the river.

  REFUSING HEAVEN

  The old women in black at early Mass in winter

  are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes

  they have seen Christ. They make the kernel

  of his being and the clarity around it

  seem meager, as though he needs girders

  to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses

  against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.

  Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges

  across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills

  along the banks where he became a young man

  as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten

  again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them

  even though they are gone, to measure against.

  The silver is worn down to the brass underneath

  and is the better for it. He will gauge

  by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.

  He is like an old ferry dragged onto the shore,

  a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams

  and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.

  A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.

  THE FRIENDSHIP INSIDE US

  Why the mouth? Why is it the mouth we put to mouth

  at the final moments? Why not the famous groin?

  Because the groin is far away.

  The mouth is close up against the spirit.

  We couple desperately all night before setting out

  for years in prison. But that is the body’s goodbye.

  We kiss the person we love last thing before

  the coffin is shut, because it is our being

  touching the unknown. A kiss is the frontier in us.

  It is where the courting becomes the courtship,

  where the dancing ends and the dance begins.

  The mouth is our chief access to the intimacy

  in which she may reside. Her mouth is the porch

  of the brain. The forecourt of the heart.

  The way to the mystery enthroned. Where we meet

  momentarily amid the seraphim and the powers.

  A THANKSGIVING DANCE

  His spirit dances the long ago, and later.

  Starlight on a country road in worn-out

  western Pennsylvania. The smell of weeds

  and rusting iron. And gladness.

  His spirit welcomes the Italian New Year’s

  in a hill town filled with the music

  of glass crashing everywhere in the cobbled

  streets. Champagne and the first kisses.

  Too shy to look at each other and no language

  between them. He dances alone, the dance

  of after that. Now they sit amid the heavy

  Roman sunlight and talk of the people

  they are married to now. He secretly

  dances the waltz she was in her astonishing

  beauty, drinking wine and laughing, the window

  behind her filled with winter rain.

  HORSES AT MIDNIGHT WITHOUT A MOON

  Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.

  Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

  But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down

  but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

  The summer mornings begin inch by inch

  while we sleep, and walk with us later

  as long-legged beauty through

  the dirty streets. It is no surprise

  that danger and suffering surround us.

  What astonishes is the singing.

  We know the horses are there in the dark

  meadow because we can smell them,

  can hear them breathing.

  Our spirit persists like a man struggling

  through the frozen valley

  who suddenly smells flowers

  and realizes the snow is melting

  out of sight on top of the mountain,

  knows that spring has begun.

  IMMACULATE

  For Michiko

  The brain is dead and the body is

  no longer infected by the spirit.

  Now it is just machines talking

  to the machine. Helping it back

  to its old, pure journey.

  MOREOVER

  We are given the trees so we can know

  what God looks like. And rivers

  so we might understand Him. We are allowed

  women so we can get into bed with the Lord,

  however partial and momentary that is.

  The passion, and then we are single again

  while the dark goes on. He lived

  in the Massachusetts woods for two years.

  Went out naked among the summer pines

  at midnight when the moon would allow it.

  He watched the aspens when the afternoon breeze

  was at them. And listened to rain

  on the butternut tree near his window.

  But when he finally left, they did not care.

  The difficult garden he was midwife to

  was indifferent. The eight wild birds

  he fed through both winters, when the snow

  was starving them, forgot him immediately.

  And the three women he ate of and entered

  utterly then and before, who were his New World

  as immensity and landfall, are now only friends

  or dead. What we are given is taken away,

  but we manage to keep it secretly.

  We lose everything, but make harvest

  of the consequence it was to us. Memory

  builds this kingdom from the fragments

  and approximation. We are gleaners who fill

  the barn for the winter that comes on.

  A KIND OF DECORUM

  It is burden enough that death lies on all sides,

  that your old kimono is still locked in my closet.

  Now I wonder what would happen if my life did

  catch on fire again. Would I break in half,

  part of me a storm and part like ice in a silver bowl?

  I lie
awake remembering the birds of Kyoto

  calling No No, unh unh. No No, unh unh. And you

  saying yes all night. You said yes when I woke you

  again in the dawn. And even disgracefully

  at lunchtime. Until all the men at the small inn

  roamed about, hoping to see whoever that voice was.

  The Buddha tells us we should clear every obstacle

  out of the way. “If you meet your mother in the path,

  kill her. If the Buddha gets in the way, kill him.”

  But my spirit sings like the perishing cicadas

  while I sit in the back yard hitting an old pot.

  A WALK BLOSSOMING

  The spirit opens as life closes down.

  Tries to frame the size of whatever God is.

  Finds that dying makes us visible.

  Realizes we must get to the loin of that

  before time is over. The part of which

  we are the wall around. Not the good or evil,

  neither death nor afterlife but the importance

  of what we contain meanwhile. (He walks along

  remembering, biting into beauty,

  the heart eating into the naked spirit.)

  The body is a major nation, the mind is a gift.

  Together they define substantiality.

  The spirit can know the Lord as a flavor

  rather than power. The soul is ambitious

  for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament

  that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.

  FARMING IN SECRET

  They piled the bound angels with the barley

  in the threshing ring and drove the cow

  and donkeys over them all day. Threw the mix

  into the wind from the sea to separate

  the blond grain from the gold of what

  had been. It burned in the luminous air.

  When the night came, the mound of chaff

  was almost higher than the farmhouse. But there

  were only eight sacks of the other.

  DECEMBER NINTH, 1960

  Walked around Bologna at three in the morning.

  Beautiful, arcaded, deserted piazza and winter rain.

  Got the train at five of four. Slept badly

  in a hot compartment, curled up on my half

 

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