by Jack Gilbert
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.
He used to wonder about the proper occasion
for casting away stones, whether it might
mean desire. He wonders if Pimpaporn went back
to her village, pictures the jungle and houses
made of teak on stilts. Tries to understand that
as a real world. Tries to know her belatedly.
He thinks of the multitude of giant rats he killed
in those cavernous, Sunday-empty, neon-dark
steel mills. Remembers piling them up
on winter nights, the weight of each, one after
the other. White mist on the black river outside.
THE MILK OF PARADISE
On the beach below Sperlonga everyone else is
speaking Italian, lazily paradisal in the heat.
He tries to make something of it, as though
something were going on. As though there were
something to be found in the obvious nakedness
of breasts. He complicates what is easily true,
hunting it down. It matters disproportionately
to him to see the ocean suddenly as he turns over.
He watches the afternoon as though it had
a secret. For years he will be considering
the two women nearby who decide to get lunch
at the restaurant back by the cliff. The taller
one picks up her top and tries to get
into it as they start out. But it tangles,
and she gives it indolently to the prettier one,
who puts it on as they walk away carelessly
into the garnishing Mediterranean light.
GIFT HORSES
He lives in the barrens, in dying neighborhoods
and negligible countries. None with an address.
But still the Devil finds him. Kills the wife
or spoils the marriage. Publishes each place
and makes it popular, makes it better, makes it
unusable. Brings news of friends, all defeated,
most sick or sad without reasons. Shows him
photographs of the beautiful women in old movies
whose luminous faces sixteen feet tall looked out
at the boy in the dark where he grew his heart.
Brings pictures of what they look like now.
Says how lively they are, and brave despite their age.
Taking away everything. For the Devil is commissioned
to harm, to keelhaul us with loss, with knowledge
of how all things splendid are disfigured by small
and small. Yet he allows us to eat roast goat
on the mountain above Parakia. Lets us stumble
for the first time, unprepared, onto the buildings
of Palladio in moonlight. Maybe because he is not
good at his job. I believe he loves us against
his will. Because of the women and how the men
struggle to hear inside them. Because we construe
something important from trees and locomotives,
smell weeds on a hot July afternoon and are augmented.
HARD WIRED
He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
inside him. He labors up through the pines
with firewood and goes back down again.
Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries
finished, and the iris gone before that.
The peas dead in the garden and the beans
almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.
The thing is inside him like that, and will
come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.
Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often
in the dark and ends up throwing stones.
The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,
cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.
They stand glaring in the faint starlight.
THE WHITE HEART OF GOD
The snow falling around the man in the naked woods
is like the ash of heaven, ash from the cool fire
of God’s mother-of-pearl, moon-stately heart.
Sympathetic but not merciful. His strictness
parses us. The discomfort of living this way
without birds, among maples without leaves, makes
death and the world visible. Not the harshness,
but the way this world can be known by pushing
against it. And feeling something pushing back.
The whiteness of the winter married to this river
makes the water look black. The water actually
is the color of giant mirrors set along the marble
corridors of the spirit, the mirrors empty
of everything. The man is doing the year’s accounts.
Finding the balance, trying to estimate how much
he has been translated. For it does translate him,
well or poorly. As the woods are translated
by the seasons. He is searching for a baseline
of the Lord. He searches like the blind man
going forward with a hand stretched out in front.
As the truck driver ice-fishing on the big pond
tries to learn from his line what is down there.
The man attends to any signal that might announce
Jesus. He hopes for even the faintest evidence,
the presence of the Lord’s least abundance. He measures
with tenderness, afraid to find a heart more classical
than ripe. Hoping for honey, for love’s alembic.
MICHIKO NOGAMI (1946–1982)
Is she more apparent because she is not
anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake
with the sound of their petals falling.”
THE CONTAINER FOR THE THING CONTAINED
What is the man searching for inside her blouse?
He has been with her body for seven years
and still is surprised by the arches of her
slender feet. He still traces her spine
with careful attention, feeling for the bones
of her pelvic girdle when he arrives there.
Her flesh is bright in sunlight and then not
as he leans forward and back. Picasso in his later
prints shows himself as a grotesque painter
watching closely a young Spanish woman on the bed
with her legs open and the old duenna in black
to the side. He had known nakedness every day
for sixty years. What could there be in it still
to find? But he was happy even then to get
close to the distant, distant intermittency.
Like a piano playing faintly on a second floor
in a back room. The music seems familiar, but is not.
MOMENT OF GRACE
Mogins disliked everything about Anna’s pregnancy.
Said it was organs and fluids and stuff no man wanted
to know about. He was so disturbed by her milkiness
after the birth that he took his class to another part
of Denmark for the summer. When we finally made love,
the baby began to cry, and I went to get him. Anna held
the boy as we continued, until the strength went out
of her and I cradled his nakedness asleep against me
as we passed through the final stages. In the happiness
afterward, both of us nursed at her, our heads
nudging each other blindly in the brilliant dark.
THE LORD SITS WITH ME OUT IN FRONT
The Lord sits with me out in front watching
a sweet darkness begin in the fields.
/> We try to decide whether I am lonely.
I tell about waking at four a.m. and thinking
of what the man did to the daughter of Louise.
And there being no moon when I went outside.
He says maybe I am getting old.
That being poor is taking too much out of me.
I say I am fine. He asks for the Brahms.
We watch the sea fade. The tape finishes again
and we sit on. Unable to find words.
BETWEEN AGING AND OLD
I wake up like a stray dog
belonging to no one.
Cold, cold, and the rain.
Friendships outgrown or ruined.
And love, dear God, the women
I have loved now only names
remembered: dead, lost, or old.
Mildness more and more the danger.
Living among rocks and weeds
to guard against wisdom.
Alone with the heart howling
and refusing to let it feed on
mere affection. Lying in the dark,
singing about the intractable
kinds of happiness.
THE HISTORY OF MEN
It thrashes in the oaks and soughs in the elms,
catches on innocence and soon dismantles that.
Sends children bewildered into life. Childhood
ends and is not buried. The young men ride out
and fall off, the horses wandering away. They get
on boats, are carried downstream, discover maidens.
They marry them without meaning to, meaning no harm,
the language beyond them. So everything ends.
Divorce gets them nowhere. They drift away from
the ruined women without noticing. See birds
high up and follow. “Out of earshot,” they think,
puzzled by earshot. History driving them forward,
making a noise like the wind in maples, of women
in their dresses. It stings their hearts finally.
It wakes them up, baffled in the middle of their lives
on a small bare island, the sea blue and empty,
the days stretching all the way to the horizon.
OLDER WOMEN
Each farmer on the island conceals
his hive far up on the mountain,
knowing it will otherwise be plundered.
When they die, or can no longer make
the hard climb, the lost combs year
after year grow heavier with honey.
And the sweetness has more and more
acutely the taste of that wilderness.
EXCEEDING
Flying up, crossing over, going forward.
Passing through, getting deep enough. Breaking
into, finding the way, living at the heart
and going beyond that. Finally realizing
that arriving is not the same as being resident.
That what we do is not what we are doing.
We go into the orchard for apples. But what
we carry back is the day among trees with odor,
coolness, dappled light and time. The season
and geese going over. Always and always
with death to come, and before that the dishonor
of growing old. But meanwhile the trees are
heavy with ripe fruit. We try to visit Greece
and find ourselves instead in the pointless noon
standing among vetch and grapes, disassembling
as night climbs beautifully out of the earth
and God holds His breath. In the distance there is
the faint clatter of a farmer’s bucket as she
gets water up at the well for the animals.
INFIDELITY
He stands freezing in the dark courtyard looking up
at their bright windows, as he has many nights since
moving away. Because of his promise, he does not
go up. He is thinking of the day she came back
from the hospital. They did not know her then.
He was looking down because of the happiness in her
voice talking to her husband as they went across
the courtyard. She saw him and, grinning, held up
the newborn child. Now it is the last time ever.
He finally knocks. Her eyes widen when she opens
the door. She looks to indicate her husband is home
as she unbuttons her dress. He whispers that his hands
are too cold. It will make me remember better,
she says, and puts them on her nakedness, wincing,
eyes wild with love. It is snowing when he leaves,
the narrow street lit here and there by shop windows.
Tomorrow he will be on the train with his wife, watching
the shadows on the snow. Going south to live silently
with perfect summer skies and the brilliant Aegean.
HIGHLIGHTS AND INTERSTICES
We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.
PEACHES
The ship goes down and everybody is lost, or is living
comfortably in Spain. He finds himself at the edge
of emptiness, absence and heat everywhere.
Just shacks along the beach and nobody in them.
He has listened to the song so often that he hears
only the spaces between the notes. He stands there,
remembering peaches. A strange, almost gray kind
that had little taste when he got them home, and that
little not much good. But there had to be a reason
why people bought them. So he decided to make jam.
When he smelled the scorching, they were already tar.
Scraped out the mess and was glad to have it over.
Found himself licking the crust on the spoon. Next day
he had eaten the rest, still not sure whether he liked
it or not. And never able to find any of them since.
MUSIC IS THE MEMORY OF WHAT NEVER HAPPENED
We stopped to eat cheese and tomatoes and bread
so good it made me foolish. The woman with me
wanted to go through the palace of the papal
captivity. Hazley and Stern said they were going
to the whorehouse. That surprised me twice
because it was only two in the afternoon.
The woman and I went to the empty palace
and met them later to drive on. They said
how neat and clean it was in the whorehouse,
and how all the men and most of the women had
been in the fourth grade together. I remember
the soft way they said it but not what they told
about going upstairs. It is not the going instead
to a blank palace where history had left no smell
that I regret. It is not even the dream
of a Mediterranean woman pulling off her dress,
the long tousled dark hair, or even the white
teeth in the shuttered room as she smiled
mischievously at the young American. I regret
the fresh coolness when they went inside from
the July heat and everybody talking quietly
as they drank ordinary wine in that promised land.
ALTERNATIVES
It wa
s half a palace, half an ancient fort,
and built of mud. The home of a fierce baroness.
The rest were men, mostly elderly, and all German.
When Denise arrived, it woke them from their habits.
Not because she was exciting, since the men were
only interested in boys. But soon they were taking
turns choosing her costumes and displaying her
on low couches, or half asleep in nests of cushions
on the wonderful rugs. They did not want her naked
unless covered with jewelry. Always coaxed
her to sing, to have the awkwardness and the way
she sang off-key mix with the nipples so evident,
the heavy skirts rucked up. It dominated
the evenings. They insisted she tell stories
but did not listen to the rambling accounts
of growing up in Zurich. Two were interested
in the year she modeled for Vogue. More responded
to the life in Paris: fancy dinners where
perfectly dressed men and women made love to her
with hands and mouths and delicate silver instruments.
For the Germans, decadence was undistinguished,
but it mattered when they recognized the names
of nobles, the painters, and the young couturière
who was the sensation of that season.
What Denise remembers most from the nights
is how they ended. She and the man with her
would each choose a lad and go up to the bedroom
with the wild lamentation of the unchosen following
behind them. Most had never seen a beautiful woman.
None had seen a white one. They were desperate
in their loss. When the boys were forced out,
they pounded on the great door, a thunder searching
through the empty corridors. Some went around
to the side where her window was. Swarmed up
each other’s back until there were lines up the wall
six and seven bodies high. When one reached the sill
he fell immediately, because the seeing was so intense.
A long wail and a thud, and then the whimpering
and barking began again. But what she dreams of
