by Jack Gilbert
It’s not the dreams.
It’s this love of you
that grows in me
malignant.
HOUSE ON THE CALIFORNIA MOUNTAIN
one All at once these owls
waiting under the white eaves
my burrowing heart
one In your bright climate
three machines and a tiger
promote my still life
one All this rainless month
hearing the terrible sound
of apples at night
one Above the bright bay
a white bird tilting to dark
for only me now
one You sent loud young men
to collect your well-known things
it may be kindness
one The pear tree is dead
our garden full of winter
only silence grows
one A tin bird turning
across the tarnished water
for not even me
one Always I will live
in that Green Castle with rain
and my ugly love
MYSELF CONSIDERED AS THE MONSTER IN THE FOREGROUND
This monster inhabits no classical world.
Nor Sienese. He ranges the Village
and the Colosseum of Times Square.
Foraging heavily through Provincetown,
through the Hub, Denver, and the Vieux Carré,
He comes at last to the last city—
past the limbo of Berkeley to North Beach
and the nine parts of Market Street.
Having evaded the calm bright castle,
so beautiful, and fatal, on the nearby hill,
the beast goes persistently toward purgatory
as his special journey to salvation. No girl-
princess will kiss this dragon to prince.
And as always, the hero with the vacant face
who charges on the ignorant horse to preserve
the Aristotelian suburb is harmless.
Safe and helpless, the monster must fashion
his own blessing or doom. He goes down,
as it is in the nature of serpents to go down,
but goes down with a difference, down to the mountain
that he must and would eventually ascend.
Yet monster he is, with a taste for decay.
Who feeds by preference on novelty and shock;
on the corrupt and vulgar, the abnormal and sick.
He feeds with pleasure in the electric swamp
of Fosters with its night tribe of Saint Jude.
Delights in the dirty movies of the arcades
and the Roman crowds of blatant girls
with their fat breasts and smug faces.
The beast rejoices in fires and fanatics,
and the revelations gestured by the drunk
stunned by the incredible drug store.
Still it is a beast bent on grace.
A monster going down hoping to prove
a monster by emphasis and for a time—
knowing how many are feeding and crying
they are saintly dragons on their way to God,
looking for the breakthrough to heaven.
But the monster goes down as required. O pray
for this foolish, maybe chosen beast.
IN PERUGINO WE HAVE SOMETIMES SEEN OUR COUNTRY
For Gianna
In Perugino we have sometimes seen our country.
Incidental, beyond the Madonna, the mild hills
and the valley we have always almost remembered,
the light which explains our secret conviction
of exile. That light, that valley, those hills,
that country where people finally touch
as we would touch, reaching with hand and body
and mouth, crying, and do not meet.
Those perfect small trees of loneliness,
dark with my longing against the light.
A POEM FOR THE FIN DU MONDE MAN
I
In the beginning
there were six brown dragons
whose names were
Salt, Salt, Salt, Salt,
Bafflebar
and Kenneth Rexroth.
II
They were everything and identical and formless.
Being everything, they lived, of necessity,
inside each other.
Being formless, they were, of necessity,
dull.
And the world was without savor.
III
Then the fourth dragon,
whose name was Salt,
died,
or lost interest
and stopped.
So anxiety came into the world.
IV
Which so troubled the first dragon
that he coiled his body to make space
and filled it with elm trees
and paradichlorobenzene
and moons
and a fish called Humuhumunukunukuapua’a.
V
But nothing would stay fresh.
The elm trees bore winter.
The moons kept going down.
The Humuhumunukunukuapua’a kept floating to the top of the tank.
And he found there was no end to the odor of
paradichlorobenzene.
VI
So the second and sixth dragons
decided to help
and to demonstrate the correct way
of making things.
But everything somehow came out men and women.
And the world was in real trouble.
VII
In alarm, the dragons quit.
But it was too late.
All over the world men were talking about the elms.
Or calculating about the moon.
Or writing songs about the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a.
And the women sat around repeating over and over how they absolutely could not stand the smell of paradichlorobenzene.
If you’re a dragon with nothing to do, LOOK OUT.
RAIN
Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
and yellow
a terrible amber.
In the cold streets
your warm body.
In whatever room
your warm body.
Among all the people
your absence.
The people who are always
not you.
I have been easy with trees
too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
suddenly
this rain.
COUNTY MUSICIAN
It was not impatience.
Impatient Orpheus was,
certainly, but no child.
And the provision was clear.
It was not impatience,
but despair. From the beginning,
it had gone badly.
From the beginning.
From the first laughter.
It was hell. Not a fable
of mechanical pain,
but the important made trivial.
Therefore the permission.
She had lived enough
in the always diversion.
Granted therefore.
It was not impatience,
but to have at least the face
seen freshly with loss
forever. A landscape.
It was not impatience.
He turned in despair.
And saw, at a distance, her back.
MALVOLIO IN SAN FRANCISCO
Two days ago they were playing the piano
with a hammer and blowtorch.
Next week they will read poetry
to saxophones.
And always they are building the Chinese Wall
of laughter.
They l
augh so much.
So much more than I do.
And it doesn’t wear them out
as it wears me out.
That’s why your poetry’s no good,
they say.
You should turn yourself upside down
so your ass would stick out,
they say.
And they seem to know.
They are right, of course.
I do feel awkward playing the game.
I do play the clown badly.
I cannot touch easily.
But I mistrust the ways of this city
with its white skies and weak trees.
One finds no impala here.
And the birds are pigeons.
The first-rate seems unknown
in this city of easy fame.
The hand’s skill is always
from deliberate labor.
They put Phidias in prison
about his work on the Parthenon,
saying he had stolen gold.
And he probably had.
Those who didn’t try to body Athena
they stayed free.
And Orpheus probably invited the rending
by his stubborn alien smell.
Poor Orpheus
who lost so much by making the difficult journey
when he might have grieved
easily.
Who tried to go back among the living
with the smell of journey on him.
Poor Orpheus
his stubborn tongue
blindly singing all the way to Lesbos.
What if I should go yellow-stockinged
and cross-gartered?
Suppose I did smile
fantastically,
kissed my hand to novelty,
what then?
Still would they imprison me in their dark house.
They would taunt me as doctors
concerned for my health
and laugh.
Always that consuming,
unrelenting laughter.
The musk deer is beguiled down from the great mountain
by flutes
to be fastened in a box
and tortured for the smell of his pain.
Yet somehow
there is somehow
I long for my old bigotry.
ORPHEUS IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
What if Orpheus,
confident in the hard-
found mastery,
should go down into Hell?
Out of the clean light down?
And then, surrounded
by the closing beasts
and readying his lyre,
should notice, suddenly,
they had no ears?
DON GIOVANNI ON HIS WAY TO HELL
The oxen have voices
the flowers are wounds
you never recover from Tuscany noons
they cripple with beauty
and butcher with love
sing folly, sing flee, sing going down
the moon is corroding
the deer have gone lame
(but you never escape the incurably sane
uncrippled by beauty
unbutchered by love)
sing folly, flee, sing going down
now it rains in your bowels
it rains though you weep
with terrible tameness it rains in your sleep
and cripples with beauty
and butchers with love
you never recover
you never escape
and you mustn’t endeavor to find the mistake
that cripples with beauty
that butchers as love
sing folly, sing flee, sing going down
sing maidens and towns, oh maidens and towns
folly, flee, sing going down
DON GIOVANNI ON HIS WAY TO HELL (II)
For Sue
How could they think women a recreation?
Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest?
Only the ignorant or the busy could. That elm
of flesh must prove a luxury of primes;
be perilous and dear with rain of an alternate earth.
Which is not to damn the forested China of touching.
I am neither priestly nor tired, and the great knowledge
of breasts with their loud nipples congregates in me.
The sudden nakedness, the small ribs, the mouth.
Splendid. Splendid. Splendid. Like Rome. Like loins.
A glamour sufficient to our long marvelous dying.
I say sufficient and speak with earned privilege,
for my life has been eaten in that foliate city.
To ambergris. But not for recreation.
I would not have lost so much for recreation.
Nor for love as the sweet pretend: the children’s game
of deliberate ignorance of each to allow the dreaming.
Not for the impersonal belly nor the heart’s drunkenness
have I come this far, stubborn, disastrous way.
But for relish of those archipelagoes of person.
To hold her in hand, closed as any sparrow,
and call and call forever till she turn from bird
to blowing woods. From woods to jungle. Persimmon.
To light. From light to princess. From princess to woman
in all her fresh particularity of difference.
Then oh, through the underwater time of night,
indecent and still, to speak to her without habit.
This I have done with my life, and am content.
I wish I could tell you how it is in that dark,
standing in the huge singing and the alien world.
BEFORE MORNING IN PERUGIA
Three days I sat
bewildered by love.
Three nights I watched
the gradations of dark.
Of light. Saw
three mornings begin,
and was taken each time
unguarded
of the loud bells.
My heart split open
as a melon.
And will not heal.
Gives itself
senselessly
to the old women
carrying milk.
The clumsy men sweeping.
To roofs.
God protect me.
MIDNIGHT IS MADE OF BRICKS
What pleasure hath it, to see in a mangled carcase?
—The Confessions of Saint Augustine
I am old of this ravening.
Poisoned of their God-damned flesh.
The ugly man-flesh.
And the fat woman-flesh.
I am tired and sick and old of it.
But the precise addiction is unrelenting.
Even now
it rouses sluggishly in me
and soon the imperious iron bells
bells
will begin
and the knowledge of the next one
will enter me
the realization of her walking peacefully
somehow toward our somewhere meeting.
The realization will come
and the need will be on me
and I must begin again.
Seeking along the great river of Fillmore
or the quiet river of Pacific Heights
with its birds.
Or through the cities of Market Street.
Perhaps this time it will be back
at the beginning
in North Beach.
In Vesuvio’s maybe
where they come like deer.
Or The Place where they come like
ugly deer
laughing
and telling me
all intense
how they want to experience
everything.
Till the shouting begins in my head.
Asking me if I believe in Evil.
And th
e power climbs in me like Kong.
In the morning
it will be like every morning.
The filthy taste in my mouth
of old, clotting blood
the vomiting
and the murderous, stupid labor
with the stupid, open body.
THE NIGHT COMES EVERY DAY TO MY WINDOW
The night comes every day to my window.
The serious night, promising, as always,
age and moderation. And I am frightened
dutifully, as always, until I find
in the bed my three hearts and the cat
in my stomach talking, as always now,
of Gianna. And I am happy through the dark
with my feet singing of how she lies
warm and alone in her dark room
over Umbria where the brief and only
paradise flowers white by white.
I turn all night with the thought of her mouth
a little open, and hunger to walk
quiet in the Italy of her head, strange
but no tourist on the streets of her childhood.
MEELEE’S AWAY
(after Waley)
Meelee’s away in Lima.
No one breeds flowers in my head.
Of course, women do breed flowers in my head
but not like Meelee’s—
So fragile, so pale.
THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE
The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
the bravery. Say it’s not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn’t that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
