by Jack Gilbert
and practicing discontent. Seeing the poverty
in the perfection, but still hungering
for its strictness. Thinking of
a Greek farmer in the orchard,
the white almond blossoms falling and falling
on him as he struggled with his wooden plow.
I remember the stark and precious winters in Paris.
Just after the war when everyone was poor and cold.
I walked hungry through the vacant streets at night
with the snow falling wordlessly in the dark like petals
on the last of the nineteenth century. Substantiality
seemed so near in the grand empty boulevards,
while the famous bronze bells told of time.
Stripping everything down until being was visible.
The ancient buildings and the Seine,
small stone bridges and regal fountains flourishing
in the emptiness. What fine provender in the want.
What freshness in me amid the loneliness.
’TIS HERE! ’TIS HERE! ’TIS GONE!
(THE NATURE OF PRESENCE)
A white horse, Linda Gregg wrote, is not a horse,
quoting what Hui Shih said twenty-three hundred
years ago. The thing is not its name, is not
the words. The painting of a pipe is not a pipe
regardless of what the title claims. An intelligent
poet in Iowa is frightened because she thinks
we are made of electrons. The Gianna Gelmetti
I loved was a presence ignited in a swarm
of energy, but the ghost living in the mansion
is not the building. Consciousness is not
matter dreaming. If all the stars were added
together they would still not know it’s spring.
The silence of the mountain is not our silence.
The sound of the earth will never be Un bel di.
We are a contingent occurrence. The white horse
in moonlight is more white than when it stands
in sunlight. And even then it depends on whether
a bell is ringing. The intimate body of the Valerie
I know is not the secret body my friend knows.
The luster of her breasts is conditional:
clothed or not, desired or too familiar.
The fact of them is mediated by morning
or the depth of night when it’s pouring down rain.
The reason we cannot enter the same woman
twice is not because the mesh of energy flexes.
It is a mystery separate from both matter
and electrons. It is not why the Linda
looking out over the Aegean is not the Linda
eating melon in Kentucky, nor explains how
the mind lives amid the rain without being
part of it. The dead lady Nogami-san lives now
only in me, in the momentary occasion I am.
Her whiteness in me is the color of pale amber
in winter light.
AMBITION
Having reached the beginning, starting toward
a new ignorance. Places to become,
secrets to live in, sins to achieve.
Maybe South America, perhaps a new woman,
another language to not understand.
Like setting out on a raft over an ocean
of life already well lived.
A two-story failed hotel in the tropics,
hot silence of noon with the sun
straying through the shutters.
Sitting with his poems at a small table,
everybody asleep. Thinking with pleasure,
trailing his hand in the river he will
turn into.
BEING YOUNG BACK THEN
Another beautiful love letter
trying to win her back. Finished,
like each night, just before dawn.
Down the corso Garibaldi to the Piazza
Fortebraccio. Across to the massive
Etruscan gate and up the via
Ulisse Rocchi. To the main square.
Past the cathedral, past the fountain
of Nicola Pisano. And the fine
thirteenth-century town hall.
To the post office so the letter
could get to California in three days.
Then to the palazzo to stand always
for a half hour looking up to where
Gianna was sleeping. Longing for
her and dreaming of the other one.
NOT GETTING CLOSER
Walking in the dark streets of Seoul
under the almost full moon.
Lost for the last two hours.
Finishing a loaf of bread
and worried about the curfew.
I have not spoken for three days
and I am thinking, “Why not just
settle for love? Why not just
settle for love instead?”
ADULTS
The sea lies in its bed wet and naked
in the dark. Half a moon glimmers on it
as though someone had come through
a door with the light behind. The woman thinks
of how they lived in the neighborhood
for years while she belonged to other men.
He moves toward her knowing he is about to
spoil the way they didn’t know each other.
SEEN FROM ABOVE
In the end, Hannibal walked out of his city
saying the Romans wanted only him. Why should
his soldiers make love to their swords?
He walked out alone, a small figure in
the great field, his elephants dead at
the bottom of the Alps’ crevasses. So might we
go to our Roman death in triumph. Our love
is of marble and large tawny roses,
in the endless harvests of our defeat.
We have slept with death all our lives.
It will grind out its graceless victory,
but we can limp in triumph over the cold
intervening sand.
GETTING CLOSER
The heat’s on the bus with us.
The icon in front, the chunk
of raw meat in the rack
on the other side. The boy
languid in the seat under it
rubbing his eyes. Old women
talking almost softly.
Quietly, I look in the bus waiting
next to us and meet the eyes
of a pretty Greek girl.
She looks back steadily.
I drop my eyes and the bus
drives away.
THE MAIL
What the hell are you doing out there
(he writes) in that worn rock valley
with chickens and the donkey and not farming?
And the people around you speaking Greek.
And the only news faint on the Armed
Forces Network. I don’t know what to say.
And what about women? he asks. Yes,
I think to myself, what about women?
LESS BEING MORE
It started when he was a young man
and went to Italy. He climbed mountains,
wanting to be a poet. But was troubled
by what Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in
her journal about William having worn
himself out searching all day to find
a simile for nightingale. It seemed
a long way from the tug of passion.
He ended up staying in pensioni
where the old women would take up
the children in the middle of the night
to rent the room, carrying them warm
and clinging to the mothers, the babies
making a mewing sound. He began hunting
for the second-rate. The insignificant
ruins, the negligible museums, the back-
cou
ntry villages with only one pizzeria
and two small bars. The unimproved.
HOMAGE TO WANG WEI
An unfamiliar woman sleeps on the other side
of the bed. Her faint breathing is like a secret
alive inside her. They had known each other
three days in California four years ago. She was
engaged and got married afterwards. Now the winter
is taking down the last of the Massachusetts leaves.
The two o’clock Boston & Maine goes by,
calling out of the night like trombones rejoicing,
leaving him in the silence after. She cried yesterday
when they walked in the woods, but she didn’t want
to talk about it. Her suffering will be explained,
but she will be unknown nevertheless. Whatever happens,
he will not find her. Despite the tumult and trespass
they might achieve in the wilderness of their bodies
and the voices of the heart clamoring, they will still
be a mystery each to the other, and to themselves.
THE BUTTERNUT TREE AT FORT JUNIPER
I called the tree a butternut (which I don’t think
it is) so I could talk about how different
the trees are around me here in the rain.
It reminds me how mutable language is. Keats
would leave blank places in his drafts to hold on
to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.
We use them sideways. The way we automatically
add bits of shape to hold on to the dissolving dreams.
So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say,
“I love you” while we search for language
that can be heard. Which allows us to talk
about how the aspens over there tremble
in the smallest shower, while the tree over by
the window here gathers the raindrops and lets them
go in bunches. The way my heart carols sometimes,
and other times yearns. Sometimes is quiet
and other times is powerfully quiet.
DOING POETRY
Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough
that I embarrass myself working so hard
to get it right even a little,
and that little grudging and awkward.
But it’s afterwards I resent, when
the sweet sure should hold me like
a trout in the bright summer stream.
There should be at least briefly
access to your glamour and tenderness.
But there’s always this same old
dissatisfaction instead.
HOMESTEADING
It would be easy if the spirit
was reasonable, was old.
But there is a stubborn gladness.
Summer air idling in the elms.
Silence hunting in the towering
storms of heaven. Thirty-two
swans in a København dusk.
The swan bleeding to death
slowly in a Greek kitchen.
A man leaves the makeshift
restaurant plotting his improvidence.
Something voiceless flies lovely
over an empty landscape.
He wanders on the way
to whoever he will become.
Passion leaves us single and safe.
The other fervor leaves us
at risk, in love, and alone.
Married sometimes forever.
THE SWEET TASTE OF THE NIGHT
When I woke up my head was saying, “The world
will pardon my mush, but I’ve got a crush”
and I went outside. The wind was gone.
The last of the moon was just up and the stars
brighter even than usual. A freighter
in the distance was turning into the bay,
all lit up. The valley was so still I could
hear the engine. The dogs quiet, worn out barking
all week at the full moon. Their ease in failure.
The ship came out the other side of the hill
and blew its horn softly for the harbor.
Waking a rooster on the mountain. It went
behind the second hill and I started back inside
the farmhouse. “All the day and night time,
hear me cry. The world will pardon my emotion,”
I sang from my bed, up into the dark, my voice
unfamiliar after not speaking for days.
Thinking of Linda, but singing to something else.
HONOR
All honor at a distance is punctilio.
One dies dutifully by a code
which applies to nothing recognizable.
It is like the perfect grace of our
contessa who has been mad and foul
for the last thirty years.
TRYING TO WRITE POETRY
There is a wren sitting in the branches
of my spirit and it chooses not to sing.
It is listening to learn its song.
Sits in the Palladian light trying to decide
what it will sing when it is time to sing.
Tra la, tra la, the other birds sing
in the morning, and silently when the snow
is slowly falling just before evening.
Knowing that passion is not a color
not confused by energy. The bird will sing
about summer having its affair with Italy.
Is frightened of classical singing.
Will sing happily of the color fruits are
in the cool dark, the wetness inside
overripe peaches, the smell of melons
and the briars that come with berries.
When the sun falls into silence,
the two birds will sing. Back and forth,
making a whole. Silence answering silence.
Song answering song. Gone and gone.
Gone somewhere. Gone nowhere.
A KIND OF COURAGE
The girl shepherd on the farm beyond has been
taken from school now she is twelve, and her life is over.
I got my genius brother a summer job in the mills
and he stayed all his life. I lived with a woman four
years who went crazy later, escaped from the hospital,
hitchhiked across America terrified and in the snow
without a coat. Was raped by most men who gave her
a ride. I crank my heart even so and it turns over.
Ranges high in the sun over continents and eruptions
of mortality, through winds and immensities of rain
falling for miles. Until all the world is overcome
by what goes up and up in us, singing and dancing
and throwing down flowers nevertheless.
HAPPILY PLANTING THE BEANS TOO EARLY
I waited until the sun was going down
to plant the bean seedlings. I was
beginning on the peas when the phone rang.
It was a long conversation about what
living this way in the woods might
be doing to me. It was dark by the time
I finished. Made tuna fish sandwiches
and read the second half of a novel.
Found myself out in the April moonlight
putting the rest of the pea shoots into
the soft earth. It was after midnight.
There was a bird calling intermittently
and I could hear the stream down below.
She was probably right about me getting
strange. After all, Basho¯ and Tolstoy
at the end were at least going somewhere.
WHAT TO WANT
The room was like getting married.
A landfall and the setting forth.
A dearness and vessel. A small room
eight by twelve, filled by the narrow iron bed.
Six stories up, under the roof
and no elevator. A maid’s room long ago.
In the old quarter, on the other hill
with the famous city stretched out
below. His window like an ocean.
The great bells of the cathedral counting
the hours all night while everyone slept.
After two years, he had come to
the beginning. Past the villa at Como,
past the police moving him from jail
to jail to hide him from the embassy.
His first woman gone back to Manhattan,
the friends gone back to weddings
or graduate school. He was finally alone.
Without money. A wind blowing through
where much of him used to be. No longer
the habit of himself. The blinding intensity
giving way to presence. The budding
amid the random passion. Mortality like
a cello inside him. Like rain in the dark.
Sin a promise. What interested him
most was who he was about to become.
BRING IN THE GODS
Bring in the gods I say, and he goes out. When he comes
back and I know they are with him, I say, Put tables in front
of them so they may be seated, and food upon the tables
so they may eat. When they have eaten, I ask which of them
will question me. Let him hold up his hand, I say.
The one on the left raises his hand and I tell him to ask.
Where are you now, he says. I stand on top of myself, I hear
myself answer. I stand on myself like a hilltop and my life
is spread before me. Does it surprise you, he asks. I explain
that in our youth and for a long time after our youth we cannot
see our lives. Because we are inside of that. Because we can
see no shape to it since we have nothing to compare it to.
We have not seen it grow and change because we are too close.
We don’t know the names of things that would bind them to us,
so we cannot feed on them. One near the middle asks why not.
Because we don’t have the knack for eating what we are living.
Why is that? she asks. Because we are too much in a hurry.
