by Jack Gilbert
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore’s heart: the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
not the month’s rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
that is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
LIONS
I carried my house to Tijuana.
I carried my house through moonlight.
Through dirt streets of cribs
and faces clustered at dark windows.
Past soft voices and foolish calls
I carried my house.
To a bright room
with its nine girls,
the projector whirring,
and steady traffic to the wooden stalls.
Sleepy and sad,
I sat all night with the absurd young
listening to the true jungle in my house
where lions ate roses of blood
and sang of Alcibiades.
SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS
It is foolish for Rubens to show her
simpering. They were clearly guilty
and did her much sorrow. But this poem
is not concerned with justice.
It concerns itself with fear.
If it could, it would force you to see
them at the hedge with their feeble eyes,
the bodies, and the stinking mouths.
To see the one with the trembling hands.
The one with the sun visor.
It would show through the leaves
all the loveliness of the world
compacted. The lavish gleaming.
Her texture. The sheen of water on her
brightness. The moon in sunlight.
Not only the choir of flesh.
Nor the intimacy of her inner mouth.
A meadow of warmth inhabited.
Personal. And the elders excluded
forever. Forever in exile.
It would show you their inexact hands
till you acknowledged how it comes on you.
I think of them pushing to the middle
of Hell where the pain is strongest.
To see at the top of the chimney,
far off, the small coin of color.
And, sometimes, leaves.
THE FOUR PERFECTLY TANGERINES
The four perfectly tangerines were a
clue
as they sat
singing
(three to one)
in that ten-thirty
a.m. room
not unhappily of death
singing of how they were tangerines
against white
but how
against continuous orange
they were only
fruit.
One sang of God
of his eight thousand green faces
and the immediate glory of his
pavilioned
dancing.
Three sang of how you can’t go back.
One sang of the seeds in his heart
of how
inside the tangerine-colored skin
inside his flesh
(which was the color of
tangerines)
were little
seeds
which were
inside
green.
So
I opened the one
and the odor of his breaking
was the sweet breasts
of being no longer
only.
THE FIRST MORNING OF THE WORLD ON LONG ISLAND
For Doris
The provisional and awkward harp
of me
makes nothing of you now.
I labor to constrain it
but am unschooled and cannot.
One learns to play the harp,
said Aristotle, by playing.
But I do not. Such a harp
grows always more dear
and I manage always less truly
well. Each visitor offhand
does better. While I with this year
of loss can do nothing.
Can say nothing of the smell
of rain in the desert
and the cottonwoods blowing
above us. If it would tell
even so little of Council Bluffs.
But it will not.
I can make it mourn
but not celebrate the River
nor my happiness in having been
of you.
I’LL TRY TO EXPLAIN ABOUT THE FEAR
I’ll try to explain about the fear
again
since you think my trouble with the whales
and elephants is a question of size.
I’m on the other inhabited island
of the Tremiti group,
looking across evening on the water
and up the enormous cliffs
to San Nicola.
I’ve been watching the few weak lights
begin,
thinking of Alcibiades
and those last years at Trebizond.
I’ve been looking at San Nicola
huddled behind the great, ruined
fortifications,
and thinking how the dark is leaking
out of the broken windows.
How the doors on those stone houses
are banging and banging and banging.
I’ve been remembering the high grass
in the piazza.
And Rimbaud in the meaningless jungle.
I know the business of the whales
may bring me there.
That trying to understand about the elephants,
about my stunned heart,
may require it.
May choose that for the last years.
A bare white room
overlooking the cathedral.
High up there
with the pure light
and the lust.
POEM FOR LAURA
Now come the bright prophets across my life.
The solemn flesh, the miracles, and the pain.
Across the simple meadows of my heart,
splendidly you come promising sorrow.
And knowing, I bless your coming with trees of love,
singing, singing even to the night.
The princely mornings will fail when you go, and night
will come like animals. Yet I open my cautious life
and sing thanksgiving of yes, oh yes to love,
even while the tireless crows of pain
and the diligent fever-ticks of sorrow
are somehow privileged in my flowering heart.
For you fashion such rivers in my soon unable heart
as are focused to paradise by the crippling night.
Such terraced waters as are cheap at only sorrow.
And to have cargoes of hyacinths sail once more my life
I will freely undertake any debt of pain.
I will break these hands for tokens, oh my love.
NEW YORK, SUMMER
I’d walk her home after work,
buying roses and talking of Bechsteins.
She was full of soul.
Her small room was gorged with heat,
and there were no windows.
S
he’d take off everything
but her pants,
and take the pins from her hair,
throwing them on the floor
with a great noise.
Like Crete.
We wouldn’t make love.
She’d get on the bed
with those nipples,
and we’d lie
sweating
and talking of my best friend.
They were in love.
When I got quiet,
she’d put on usually Debussy,
and,
leaning down to the small ribs,
bite me.
Hard.
THE BAY BRIDGE FROM POTRERO HILL
Pure
every day there’s the bridge
every day there’s the bridge
every day there’s the bridge
every day there’s the bridge
and each night.
It’s not easy to live this way.
Once
the bridge was small and stone-white
and called the Pont au Change
or the Pont Louis-Philippe.
We went home at midnight
to the Île Saint-Louis as deer
through a rustle of bells.
Six years distant
and the Atlantic
and a continent.
The way I was then
and the way I am now.
A long time.
I fed in the bright parts of the forest,
stinting to pass among the impala.
But one can acquire a taste for love
as for loneliness
or ugliness
as for saintliness.
Each a special way of going down.
That was a sweet country
and large.
Ample with esplanades,
easy with apricots.
A happy country.
But a country for children.
Now
every day there’s the bridge.
Every day there’s the exacting,
literal, foreign country of the heart.
Toads and panders
ruined horses
pears
terrifying honey
heralds
heralds
ON GROWING OLD IN SAN FRANCISCO
Two girls barefoot walking in the rain
both girls lovely, one of them is sane
hurting me softly
hurting me though
two girls barefoot walking in the snow
walking in the white snow
walking in the black
two girls barefoot never coming back
WITHOUT WATTEAU, WITHOUT BURCKHARDT, OKLAHOMA
In April, holding my house and held
unprepared in the stomach of death,
I receive the vacant landscape of America.
In April, before the concealment of beauty,
the vacant landscape of America, bright,
comes through me. Comes through my house like Laura.
Intractable, the states of reality come,
lordly, in April, Texas, impossibly
to this house furnished with the standard half-
consummated loves: Vienna under rain,
summer in the mountains above Como, Provence
the special country of my heart. In April,
inadvertently, at thirty-three, filled
with walled towns of lemon trees, I am
unexpectedly alone in West Virginia.
LETTER TO MR. JOHN KEATS
The Spanish Steps—February 23, 1961
What can I do with these people?
They come to the risk so dutifully.
Are delighted by anecdotes that give
them Poetry. Are grateful to be told
of diagonals that give them Painting.
Good people. But stubborn when warned
the beast is not domestic.
How can I persuade them
that the dark, soulful Keats
was five feet one?
Liked fighting and bear-baiting?
I can’t explain the red hair.
Nor say how you died so full
of lust for Fanny Brawne.
I will tell them of Semele.
PORTOLANO
“Asti kasmin-cit pradese nagaram”
In your thin body is an East of wonder.
In your walking are accounts of morning.
Your hands are legends, and your mouth a proof of kilins.
But the way is long
and the roads bad.
Beyond the crucial pass of Tauris
past the special lure of vice
beyond Persepolis and the ease of Badakhshan
stretches a waste of caution.
The route is difficult
and the maps wrong.
If one survives the singing-sands of pride
and the always drumming hill of fear
he finds an impregnable range of moderation.
Ascent is dangerous
and the cold maims.
Could one get through, the brilliance of Cambaluc
and the wealth of Shangtu would be there, no doubt;
but what of the Bamboo Pavilion? It is fashioned, they say,
to be easily dismantled and moved.
The Khan is seventy
and the Ming strong.
In your thin body is an East of wander.
In your seeking are distraints of mourning.
While Venice is close at hand—to be taken now or lost.
The season of grace
may be spent once.
In the pavilion, they say, are birds.
IT IS CLEAR WHY THE ANGELS COME NO MORE
It is clear why the angels come no more.
Standing so large in their beautiful Latin,
how could they accept being refracted
so small in another grammar, or leave
their perfect singing for this broken speech?
Why should they stumble this alien world?
Always I have envied the angels their grace.
But I left my hope of Byzantine size
and came to this awkwardness, this stupidity.
Came finally to you washing my face
as everyone laughed, and found a forest
opening as marriage ran in me. All
the leaves in the world turned a little
singing: the angels are wrong.
THE WHITENESS, THE SOUND, AND ALCIBIADES
So I come on this birthday at last
here in the house of strangers.
With a broken pair of shoes,
no profession, and a few poems.
After all that promise.
Not by addiction or play, by choices.
By concern for whales and love,
for elephants and Alcibiades.
But to arrive at so little product.
A few corners done,
an arcade up but unfaced,
and everywhere the ambitious
unfinished monuments to Myshkin
and magnitude. Like persisting
on the arrogant steeple of Beauvais.
I wake in Trastevere
in the house of city-peasants,
and lie in the noise dreaming
on the wealth of summer nights
from my childhood when the dark
was sixty feet deep in luxury,
of elm and maple and sycamore.
I wandered hour by hour
with my gentle, bewildered need,
following the faint sound
of women in the moving leaves.
In Latium, years ago,
I sat by the road watching
an ox come through the day.
Stark-white in the distance.
Occasionally under a tree.
Colorless in the heavy sun.
Suave in the bright shadows.
Starch-white near
in the glare.
Petal-white near in the shade.
Linen, stone-white, and milk.
Ox-white before me, and past
into the thunder of light.
For ten years I have tried
to understand about the ox.
About the sound. The whales.
Of love. And arrived here
to give thanks for the profit.
I wake to the wanton freshness.
To the arriving and leaving. To the journey.
I wake to the freshness. And do reverence.
MONOLITHOS:
Poems 1962 and 1982
[1982]
Monolithos means single stone, and refers to the small hill behind our house which gave the place we lived its name. It is the tip of a non-igneous stone island buried in debris when most of Thíra blew apart 3,500 years ago.
—J.G.
ONE—1962
BETWEEN POEMS
A lady asked me
what poets do
between poems.
Between passions
and visions. I said
that between poems
I provided for death.
She meant as to jobs
and commonly.
Commonly, I provide
against my death,
which comes on.
And give thanks
for the women I have
been privileged to
in extreme.
THE PLUNDERING OF CIRCE
Circe had no pleasure in pigs.
Pigs, wolves, nor fawning
lions. She sang in our language
and, beautiful, waited for quality.
Every month they came
struggling up from the cove.
The great sea-light behind them.
Each time maybe a world.
Season after season.
Dinner after dinner.
And always at the first measures
of lust became themselves.
Odysseus? A known liar.
A resort darling. Untouchable.
ISLANDS AND FIGS
