Collected Poems

by Jack Gilbert

  the girders and piers of the spirit, spilling out

  the heart’s melt. Incandescent ingots big as cars

  trundling out of titanic mills, red slag scaling off

  the brighter metal in the dark. The Monongahela River

  below, night’s sheen on its belly. Silence except

  for the machinery clanging deeper in us. You will

  love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time

  running out. Day after day of the everyday.

  What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.

  Newness strutting around as if it were significant.

  Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.

  I want to go back to that time after Michiko’s death

  when I cried every day among the trees. To the real.

  To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.

  VOICES INSIDE AND OUT

  For Hayden Carruth

  When I was a child, there was an old man with

  a ruined horse who drove his wagon through the back

  streets of our neighborhood, crying, Iron! Iron!

  Meaning he would buy bedsprings and dead stoves.

  Meaning for me, in the years since, the mind’s steel

  and the riveted girders of the soul. When I lived

  on Île Saint-Louis, a glazier came every morning,

  crying, Vitre! Vitre! Meaning the glass on his back,

  but sounding like the swallows swooping years later

  at evening outside my high windows in Perugia.

  In my boyhood summers, Italian men came walking ahead

  of the truck calling out the ripeness of their melons,

  and old Jews slogged in the snow, crying, Brooms! Brooms!

  Two hundred years ago, the London shop boys yelled

  at people going by, What do you lack? A terrible

  question to hear every day. “Less and less,” I think.

  The Brazilians say, “In this country we have everything

  we need, except what we don’t have.”

  TEAR IT DOWN

  We find out the heart only by dismantling what

  the heart knows. By redefining the morning,

  we find a morning that comes just after darkness.

  We can break through marriage into marriage.

  By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond

  affection and wade mouth-deep into love.

  We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

  But going back toward childhood will not help.

  The village is not better than Pittsburgh.

  Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.

  Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound

  of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls

  of the garbage tub is more than the stir

  of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not

  enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.

  We should insist while there is still time. We must

  eat through the wildness of her sweet body already

  in our bed to reach the body within that body.

  DANTE DANCING

  For Gianna Gelmetti

  I

  When he dances of meeting Beatrice that first time,

  he is a youth, his body has no real language,

  and his heart understands nothing of what has

  started. Love like a summer rain after drought,

  like the thin cry of a red-tailed hawk, like an angel

  sinking its teeth into our throat. He has only

  beginner steps to tell of the sheen inside him.

  The boy Dante sees her first with the absolute love

  possible only when we are ignorant of each other.

  Arm across his face, he runs off. Years go by.

  II

  The next dance is about their meeting again. He does

  an enchaînement around her. Beatrice’s heavy hair is

  dark and long. She watches with the occhi dolci.

  His jumps are a man’s jumps. His steps have become

  the moves of a dancer who understands the dance.

  A man who recognizes the body’s greed. She is deep

  in her body’s heart. He is splendid. She is lost

  and is led away by the aunt. Her family is careful

  after that. She goes by in a carriage. He rises

  on his toes, port de bras, his eyes desperate.

  Then she is at an upstairs window of the palace.

  He dances his sadness brilliantly in the moonlight

  below on the empty piazza, concentrating. She moves

  the curtain a little to the side, and he is happy.

  It is a dream we all know, the perfection of love

  that is not real. There is a fountain behind him.

  III

  It is a few years later and they are finally

  in his simple room. His long dance of afterward

  is a declaration of joy and of gratitude and devotion.

  She dances strangely, putting on her clothes.

  A delicate goodbye. Her soul is free now from that

  kind of love. He stands motionless, bewildered,

  watching her go. Then dances his grief wonderfully.

  IV

  We see Dante as an old man. He is a dancer who can

  manage only the simple steps of the beginning.

  He dances the romance lost, the love that never was,

  and the great love missed because of dreaming.

  First position, entrechat, and the smallest jumps.

  The passionate quiet. The quieter and strongest.

  The special sorrow of a happy, imperfect heart

  that finally knows well how to dance. But does not.

  THE GREAT FIRES

  Love is apart from all things.

  Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.

  It is not the body that finds love.

  What leads us there is the body.

  What is not love provokes it.

  What is not love quenches it.

  Love lays hold of everything we know.

  The passions which are called love

  also change everything to a newness

  at first. Passion is clearly the path

  but does not bring us to love.

  It opens the castle of our spirit

  so that we might find the love which is

  a mystery hidden there.

  Love is one of many great fires.

  Passion is a fire made of many woods,

  each of which gives off its special odor

  so we can know the many kinds

  that are not love. Passion is the paper

  and twigs that kindle the flames

  but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes

  because it tries to be love.

  Love is eaten away by appetite.

  Love does not last, but it is different

  from the passions that do not last.

  Love lasts by not lasting.

  Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire

  for his sins. Love allows us to walk

  in the sweet music of our particular heart.

  FINDING SOMETHING

  I say moon is horses in the tempered dark,

  because horse is the closest I can get to it.

  I sit on the terrace of this worn villa the king’s

  telegrapher built on the mountain that looks down

  on a blue sea and the small white ferry

  that crosses slowly to the next island each noon.

  Michiko is dying in the house behind me,

  the long windows open so I can hear

  the faint sound she will make when she wants

  watermelon to suck or so I can take her

  to a bucket in the corner of the high-ceilinged room

  which is the best we can do for a chamber pot.

  She will lean against my
leg as she sits

  so as not to fall over in her weakness.

  How strange and fine to get so near to it.

  The arches of her feet are like voices

  of children calling in the grove of lemon trees,

  where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.

  PROSPERO WITHOUT HIS MAGIC

  He keeps the valley like this with his heart.

  By paying attention, being capable, remembering.

  Otherwise, there would be flies as big as dogs

  in the vineyard, cows made entirely of maggots,

  cruelty with machinery and canvas, sniggering

  among the olive trees and the sea grossly vast.

  He struggles to hold it right, the eight feet

  of heaven by the well with geraniums and basil.

  He will rejoice even if the shepherd girl

  does not pass anymore at evening. And whether

  or not she ate her lamb at Easter. He knows

  that loneliness is our craft, that death is

  God’s vigorish. He does not keep it fine

  by innocence or leaving things out.

  FINDING EURYDICE

  Orpheus is too old for it now. His famous voice is gone

  and his career is past. No profit anymore from the songs

  of love and grief. Nobody listens. Still, he goes on

  secretly with his ruined alto. But not for Eurydice.

  Not even for the pleasure of singing. He sings because

  that is what he does. He sings about two elderly

  Portuguese men in the hot Sacramento delta country.

  How they show up every year or so, feeble and dressed

  as well as their poverty allows. The husband is annoyed

  each time by their coming to see his seventy-year-old

  wife, who, long ago when they were putting through

  the first railroads, was the most beautiful of all

  the whores. Impatient, but saying nothing, he lets them

  take her carefully upstairs to give her a bath. He does

  not understand how much their doting eyes can see the sleek,

  gleaming beauty of her hidden in the bright water.

  GOING THERE

  Of course it was a disaster.

  That unbearable, dearest secret

  has always been a disaster.

  The danger when we try to leave.

  Going over and over afterward

  what we should have done

  instead of what we did.

  But for those short times

  we seemed to be alive. Misled,

  misused, lied to and cheated,

  certainly. Still, for that

  little while, we visited

  our possible life.

  HAUNTED IMPORTANTLY

  It was in the transept of the church, winter in

  the stones, the dim light brightening on her,

  when Linda said, Listen. Listen to this, she said.

  When he put his ear against the massive door,

  there were spirits singing inside. He hunted for it

  afterward. In Madrid, he heard a bell begin somewhere

  in the night rain. Worked his way through

  the tangle of alleys, the sound deeper and more

  powerful as he got closer. Short of the plaza,

  it filled all of him and he turned back. No need,

  he thought, to see the bell. It was not the bell

  he was trying to find, but the angel lost

  in our bodies. The music that thinking is.

  He wanted to know what he heard, not to get closer.

  SEARCHING FOR PITTSBURGH

  The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,

  between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart

  and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.

  Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.

  Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh

  in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically

  along three rivers. The authority of them.

  The gritty alleys where we played every evening were

  stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,

  as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning

  the Earth. Locomotives driving through the cold rain,

  lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water

  flowing morning and night throughout a city

  girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,

  sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.

  All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.

  A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.

  Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling

  of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.

  Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged

  by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.

  The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.

  In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands

  with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,

  amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined

  house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound

  of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.

  MARRIED

  I came back from the funeral and crawled

  around the apartment, crying hard,

  searching for my wife’s hair.

  For two months got them from the drain,

  from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

  and off the clothes in the closet.

  But after other Japanese women came,

  there was no way to be sure which were

  hers, and I stopped. A year later,

  repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find

  a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

  EXPLICATING THE TWILIGHT

  The rat makes her way up

  the mulberry tree, the branches

  getting thin and risky up close

  to the fruit, and she slows.

  The berry she is after is so ripe,

  there is almost no red. Prospero

  thinks of Christopher Smart saying

  purple is black blooming. She lifts

  her mouth to the berry, stretching.

  The throat is an elegant gray.

  A thousand shades, Christopher wrote

  among the crazy people. A thousand

  colors from white to silver.

  STEEL GUITARS

  The world is announced by the smell of oregano and sage

  in rocky places high up, with white doves higher still

  in the blue sky. Or the faint voices of women and girls

  in the olive trees below, and a lustrous sea beneath that.

  Like thoughts of lingerie while reading Paradise Lost

  in Alabama. Or the boy in Pittsburgh that only summer

  he was nine, prowling near the rusty railroad yard

  where they put up vast tents and a man lifted anvils

  with chains through his nipples. The boy listened

  for the sound that made him shiver as he ran hard

  across the new sawdust to see the two women again

  on a platform above his head, indolent and almost naked

  in the simple daylight. Reality stretched thin

  as he watched their painted eyes brooding on what

  they contained. He vaguely understood that it was not

  their flesh that was a mystery but something on the other

  side of it. Now the man remembering the boy knows

  there is a door. We go through and hear a sound

  like buildings burning, like the sound of a stone hitting

  a stone in the dark. The heart in its plenty hammered

  by rain and need, by the weight of wh
at momentarily is.

  RECOVERING AMID THE FARMS

  Every morning the sad girl brings her three sheep

  and two lambs laggardly to the top of the valley,

  past my stone hut and onto the mountain to graze.

  She turned twelve last year and it was legal

  for the father to take her out of school. She knows

  her life is over. The sadness makes her fine,

  makes me happy. Her old red sweater makes

  the whole valley ring, makes my solitude gleam.

  I watch from hiding for her sake. Knowing I am

  there is hard on her, but it is the focus of her days.

  She always looks down or looks away as she passes

  in the evening. Except sometimes when, just before

  going out of sight behind the distant canebrake,

  she looks quickly back. It is too far for me to see,

  but there is a moment of white if she turns her face.

  THE SPIRIT AND THE SOUL

  It should have been the family that lasted.

  Should have been my sister and my peasant mother.

  But it was not. They were the affection,

  not the journey. It could have been my father,

  but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg

  and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me,

  and the newness after that, and newness again.

  It was the important love and the serious lust.

  It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog

  and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl,

  but the black-and-white winters with their girth

  and geological length of cold. Streets ripped

  apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when

  the snow finally left in April. Freight trains

  with their steam locomotives working at night.

  Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy,

  I saw downtown a large camera standing in front

  of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann’s

  Department Store. Usually around midnight,

  but the people still going by. The camera set

  slow enough that cars and people left no trace.