Collected Poems

by Jack Gilbert

  was blue just then at the end of the valley,

  and is blue now differently.

  THEORETICAL LIVES

  All that remains from the work of Skopas

  are the feet. Sometimes not even that.

  Sometimes only irregularities on the plinth

  that may indicate how the figure stood.

  Using the feet, or shadows of feet,

  and the exact diagrams of German professors,

  learned men argue about what the arms

  were doing and how good the sculpture was.

  As we do with our lives, guessing whether

  the woman was truly happy when it rained

  and if her father was really the ambassador.

  Whether she was passionate or just wanted to please.

  FROM THESE NETTLES, ALMS

  They dragged me down. Down the muddy hill

  with me frantically digging in my heels,

  grabbing at bushes and weeds. Kicking

  and bellowing, I was pulled down and under

  the bridge. Dead for sure, I thought,

  now that I was out of sight. They had me on

  my back and were stomping, driving in

  their heavy shoes and hurting me

  with their fists. Me yelling no! no! no!

  and twisting away, furious. And them,

  furious, trying to kill me now because

  I was too dumb to give in. Afterward,

  sitting at the bus stop cleaning off

  the blood, something in me wanted to know

  what I was like in the middle of it,

  down there under the bridge.

  HOT NIGHTS IN FLORIDA

  The woman is asleep in the bedroom. The fan is making

  its sound and the television is on behind him

  with the sound off. The chuck-will’s-widow is calling

  in the scrub across the asphalt road. Farther on,

  the people are asleep in their one-story houses

  with the lawn outside and the boat in the driveway.

  He is thinking of the British Museum. These children

  drive fast when they are awake. Twenty years ago

  this was a swamp with alligators and no shape.

  He is thinking of the Danish cold that forced him

  into the gypsy girl’s bed. Like walking through

  a door and finding Venezia when he thought he was

  in Yugoslavia. The people here seem hardly here

  at all: blond desire always in the middle of

  air conditioning. He remembers love as it could be.

  Outside, the moon is shining on nothing in particular.

  GETTING IT ALL

  The air this morning is pleasant and praises nothing.

  It lies easily on each thing. The light has no agency.

  In this kind of world, we are on our own: the plain

  black shoes of a man sitting in the doorway,

  pleats of the tall woman’s blue skirt as she hurries

  to an office farther on. We will notice maybe

  the gold-leaf edges of a book carried by the student

  glinting intermittently as she crosses into the bright

  sunlight on our side of the street. But usually

  we depend on meditation and having things augmented.

  We see the trees in their early-spring greenness,

  but not again until just before winter. The common

  is mostly beyond us. Love after the fervor, the wife

  after three thousand nights. It is easy to realize

  the horses suddenly running through an empty alley.

  But marriage is clear. Like the faint sound of a cello

  very late at night somewhere below in the stillness

  of an old building on a street named Gernesgade.

  THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  I light the lamp and look at my watch.

  Four-thirty. Tap out my shoes

  because of the scorpions, and go out

  into the field. Such a sweet night.

  No moon, but urgent stars. Go back inside

  and make hot chocolate on my butane burner.

  I search around with the radio through

  the skirl of the Levant. “Tea for Two”

  in German. Finally, Cleveland playing

  the Rams in the rain. It makes me feel

  acutely here and everybody somewhere else.

  LEPORELLO ON DON GIOVANNI

  Do you think it’s easy for him, the poor bastard?

  To be that weak whenever their music begins?

  It’s not a convenient delight, not a tempered scale.

  Not a choice. As Saint Francis had no choice,

  needing to be walled up in his stone cell all winter.

  To be flogged through Assisi naked and foul.

  God is not optional when faith is like that.

  But Francis had a vocation, not a need for silly women.

  Giovanni really believes they are important.

  Talks about them as parallel systems. Crazy stuff.

  An educated gentleman of the finest family

  wandering off helplessly after their faintest glimmer.

  He believes there is a secret melded with the ladies.

  He smiles and nods all evening as he listens

  to their chatter and the whining about their husbands.

  He says the world changes because of them.

  Their flesh unfolds and he goes through to something

  beyond the flesh. Hears a voice, he says.

  A primitive radio at the core of them.

  Growing and fading, as though it comes from the moon.

  FIRST TIMES

  I had not seen her for twenty years when she called

  to welcome me back to America, wanting to see me.

  Warning that she was past forty now and the mother

  of a seven-year-old. The lost time flooded me.

  Paris and me without money or a place to take her.

  I borrowed a room and lit candles and had wine.

  It went badly. My knees kept sliding away under me

  on the starched sheets. I managed the humiliation

  by turning my back and refusing to talk. She was

  as young as I was and felt, I suspect, relief.

  HALF THE TRUTH

  The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies

  are white all day. The Canadian geese fly over

  high up in the moonlight with the lonely sound

  of their discontent. Going south. Now the rains

  and soon the snow. The black trees are leafless,

  the flowers gone. Only cabbages are left

  in the bedraggled garden. Truth becomes visible,

  the architecture of the soul begins to show through.

  God has put off his panoply and is at home with us.

  We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty.

  We have resumed our lives. There is no hurry now.

  We make love without rushing and find ourselves

  afterward with someone we know well. Time to be

  what we are getting ready to be next. This loving,

  this relishing, our gladness, this being puts down

  roots and comes back again year after year.

  RESPECT

  For Albert Schweitzer

  This morning I found a baby scorpion,

  perfect, in the saucepan.

  Killed it with a piece of marble.

  THE LIVES OF FAMOUS MEN

  Trying to scrape the burned soup from my only pan

  with a spoon after midnight by oil lamp

  because if I do not cook the mackerel

  this hot night it will kill me tomorrow

  in the vegetable stew. Which is twice

  wasteful. Though it would be another way

  of cutting down, I am thinking, as I go out to get

  more water from the well and happen to look up

 
; through the bright stars. Yes, yes, I say,

  and go on pulling at the long rope.

  GETTING OLD

  The soft wind comes sweet in the night

  on the mountain. Invisible except for

  the sound it makes in the big poplars outside

  and the feel on his naked, single body,

  which breathes quietly a little before dawn,

  eyes open and in love with the table

  and chair in the transparent dark and stars

  in the other window. Soon it will be time

  for the first tea and cool pear and then

  the miles down and miles up the mountain.

  “Old and alone,” he thinks, smiling.

  Full of what abundance has done to his spirit.

  Feeling around inside to see if his heart

  is still, thank God, ambitious. The way

  old men look in their eyes each morning.

  Knowing she isn’t there and how much Michiko

  isn’t anywhere. The eyes close as he remembers

  seeing the big owl on the roof last night

  for the first time after hearing it for months.

  Thinking how much he has grown unsuited

  for love the size it is for him. “But maybe

  not,” he says. And the eyes open as he

  grins at the heart’s stubborn pretending.

  HOW TO LOVE THE DEAD

  She lives, the bird says, and means nothing

  silly. She is dead and available,

  the fox says, knowing about the spirits.

  Not the picture at the funeral,

  not the object of grieving. She is dead

  and you can have that, he says. If you can

  love without politeness or delicacy,

  the fox says, love her with your wolf heart.

  As the dead are to be desired.

  Not the way long marriages are,

  nothing happening again and again.

  Not in the woods or in the fields.

  Not in the cities. The painful love of being

  permanently unhoused. Not color, but the stain.

  ALMOST HAPPY

  The goldfish is dead this morning on the bottom

  of her world. The autumn sky is white,

  the trees are coming apart in the cold rain.

  Loneliness gets closer and closer.

  He drinks hot tea and sings off-key:

  This train ain’t a going-home train, this train.

  This is not a going-home train, this train.

  This train ain’t a going-home train ’cause

  my home’s on a gone-away train. That train.

  REFUSING

  HEAVEN

  [2005]

  A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

  Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

  are not starving someplace, they are starving

  somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

  But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

  Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

  be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

  be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

  at the fountain are laughing together between

  the suffering they have known and the awfulness

  in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

  in the village is very sick. There is laughter

  every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

  and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

  If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

  we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

  We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

  but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

  the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

  furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

  measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

  If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

  we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

  We must admit there will be music despite everything.

  We stand at the prow again of a small ship

  anchored late at night in the tiny port

  looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

  is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

  To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

  comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

  all the years of sorrow that are to come.

  NAKED EXCEPT FOR THE JEWELRY

  “And,” she said, “you must talk no more

  about ecstasy. It is a loneliness.”

  The woman wandered about picking up

  her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”

  the man said. “We tell lies,” she said,

  brushing her wonderful hair, naked except

  for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”

  “You were helpless with joy,” he said,

  “moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said,

  “we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.

  The heart lies to itself because it must.”

  PUT HER IN THE FIELDS FOR KINDNESS

  The door was in the whitewashed eight-foot walls

  of the narrow back street common to Greek islands.

  Beautiful light and shade in the clear air.

  The big iron bolt was on the outside locking

  something in. Some days the pounding inside

  made the heavy wooden door shudder. Often a voice

  screaming. The crazy old woman, people said.

  She would hurt the children if they let her out.

  Pinch them or scare them, they said.

  Sometimes everything was still and I would delay

  until I heard the tiny whimper that meant she knew

  I was there. Late one afternoon on my way for oil,

  the door was broken. She was in the lot opposite

  in weeds by the wall, her dress pulled up, pissing.

  Like a cow. Able to manage, quiet in the last light.

  WHAT SONG SHOULD WE SING

  The massive overhead crane comes

  when we wave to it, lets down

  its heavy claws and waits tamely

  within its power while we hook up

  the slabs of three-quarter-inch

  steel. Takes away the ponderous

  reality when we wave again.

  What name do we have for that?

  What song is there for its voice?

  What is the other face of Yahweh?

  The god who made the slug and ferret,

  the maggot and shark in his image.

  What is the carol for that?

  Is it the song of nevertheless,

  or of the empire of our heart? We carry

  language as our mind, but are we

  the dead whale that sinks grandly

  for years to reach the bottom of us?

  HAVING THE HAVING

  For Gianna

  I tie knots in the strings of my spirit

  to remember. They are not pictures

  of what was. Not accounts of dusk

  amid the olive trees and that odor.

  The walking back was the arriving.

  For that there are three knots

  and a space and another two

  close together. They do not imitate

  the inside of her body, nor her clean

  mouth. They cannot describe, but they

  can prevent remembering it wrong.

  The knots recall. The knots

  are blazons marking the trail

  back to what we own and imperfectly

  forget. Back to a bell ringing

  far off, and the sweet summer darkening.

  All but a little of it blurs and leaks

  away, but that little is most of it,

 
even damaged. Two more knots

  and then just straight string.

  SAY YOU LOVE ME

  Are the angels of her bed the angels

  who come near me alone in mine?

  Are the green trees in her window

  the color I see in ripe plums?

  If she always sees backward

  and upside down without knowing it

  what chance do we have? I am haunted

  by the feeling that she is saying

  melting lords of death, avalanches,

  rivers and moments of passing through.

  And I am replying, “Yes, yes.

  Shoes and pudding.”

  KUNSTKAMMER

  We are resident inside with the machinery,

  a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.

  We exist with a wind whispering inside

  and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,

  inside the basilica of bones. The flesh

  is a neighborhood, but not the life.

  Our body is not good at memory, at keeping.

  It is the spirit that holds on to our treasure.

  The dusk in Italy when the ferry passed Bellagio

  and turned across Lake Como in the hush to where

  we would land and start up the grassy mountain.

  The body keeps so little of the life after

  being with her eleven years,

  and the mouth not even that much. But the heart

  is different. It never forgets

  the pine trees with the moon rising behind them

  every night. Again and again we put our

  sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed

  them back into their death, each moving slowly

  into the dark, disappearing as our hearts

  visited and savored, hurt and yearned.

  HALLOWEEN

  There were a hundred wild people in Allen’s

  three-story house. He was sitting at a small

  table in the kitchen quietly eating something.

  Alone, except for Orlovsky’s little brother

  who was asleep with his face against the wall.