Collected Poems

by Jack Gilbert

  of the seat. No real dawn. Beginning to see

  a little into the mist. The looming mountain

  brindled with snow. The higher pines crusted.

  Oyster-white behind them. The train running along

  a river between the hills. Mostly apple orchards

  with occasionally pale apples still near the top.

  Also vineyards. No feeling of Italy here.

  No sense of the Umbrian peasants farming

  with their white ocean. A tractor instead

  putting out compost near an orchard with rotten

  red squash gourds. Later another man standing

  in the river with a long-handled net, looking

  steadily down. Then the commuter line between

  Bolzano and Merano. Changing pants on the toilet.

  Checked my bag in the station and walked

  to the center of the town. Hotels everywhere.

  Mountain scenery in the summer, skiing in winter.

  Went into the CIT and asked about Pound. (Because

  the address had been left at home in Perugia.)

  They said he was not there anymore. Went to

  the tourist office. Herr Herschel said, yes, Pound

  was still there. I came out chuckling, as though

  I had been sly. Then, waiting for the first bus

  to Tirolo. It leaves at ten-thirty. It’s supposed

  to be a half hour’s walk from there.

  NOT THE HAPPINESS BUT

  THE CONSEQUENCE OF HAPPINESS

  He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods,

  the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will

  not hear his voice all day. He remembers what

  the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping.

  The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking

  about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense

  of what is not. The January silence is the sound

  of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding,

  or the scraping calls of a single blue jay.

  Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute.

  Many days in the woods he wonders what it is

  that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand

  in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,

  but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married

  into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange

  mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit.

  He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying.

  For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop

  as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning

  coldness of her head when he kissed her just after.

  There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.

  It is, he decides, a quality without definition.

  How strange to discover that one lives with the heart

  as one lives with a wife. Even after many years,

  nobody knows what she is like. The heart has

  a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes,

  is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably

  after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late.

  Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods,

  leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.

  INFIDELITY

  She is never dead when he meets her.

  They eat noodles for breakfast as usual.

  For eleven years he thought it was the river

  at the bottom of his mind dreaming.

  Now he knows she is living inside him,

  as the wind is sometimes visible

  in the trees. As the roses and rhubarb

  are in the garden and then not.

  Her ashes are by the sea in Kamakura.

  Her face and hair and sweet body still

  in the old villa on a mountain where

  she lived the whole summer. They slept

  on the floor for eleven years.

  But now she comes less and less.

  THE REINVENTION OF HAPPINESS

  I remember how I’d lie on my roof

  listening to the fat violinist

  below in the sleeping village

  play Schubert so badly, so well.

  LOOKING AT PITTSBURGH FROM PARIS

  The boat of his heart is tethered to the ancient

  stone bridges. Beached on the Pacific hills with

  thick evening fog flooding whitely over the ridge.

  Running in front of the Provençal summer. Drowned

  as a secret under the broad Monongahela River.

  Forever richly laden with Oak Street and Umbria.

  “There be monsters,” they warn in the blank spaces

  of the old maps. But the real danger is the ocean’s

  insufficiency, the senseless repetition throughout

  the empty waters. Calm and storms and calm again.

  Too impoverished for the human. We come to know

  ourselves as immense continents and archipelagoes

  of endless bounty. He waits now in the hold

  of a wooden ship. Becalmed, maybe standing to.

  Bobbing, rocking softly. The cargo of ghosts

  and angels all around. The wraiths, surprisingly,

  singing with the clear voices of young boys.

  The angels clapping the rhythm. As he watches

  for morning, for the dark to give way and show

  his landfall, the new country, his native land.

  “MY EYES ADORED YOU”

  For Kerry O’Keefe

  She came into his life like arriving halfway

  through a novel, with bits of two earlier lives

  snagged in her. She was the daughter of

  a deputy attorney general. And when

  that crashed she tried singing and got married.

  Now she is in trouble again, leaving soup

  on his porch before really knowing him.

  Saying she heard he had a bad cold, and besides

  it was a tough winter. (It was like

  his first wife who went to the department store

  and bought a brass bed, getting a salesman

  his size to lie down so she could see if it fit.

  When she still knew him only at a distance.)

  But when people grow up, they should know better.

  You can’t call it romance when she already had

  two children. He had decided never again to get

  involved with love. Now everything

  has gone wrong. She doesn’t just sing softly

  up to his window. You can see them in the dark

  upstairs, him singing badly and her not minding.

  BEYOND PLEASURE

  Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important

  (however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.

  Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was

  inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,

  beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when

  he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.

  He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back

  to what he knew then. Poetry registers

  feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches

  out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.

  Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be

  an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world

  part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux

  to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.

  The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward

  to know its merit with attention.

  DUENDE

  I can’t remember her name.

  It’s not as though I’ve been in bed

  with that many women.

  The truth is I can’t even remember

&
nbsp; her face. I kind of know how strong

  her thighs were, and her beauty.

  But what I won’t forget

  is the way she tore open

  the barbecued chicken with her hands,

  and wiped the grease on her breasts.

  THE GOOD LIFE

  When he wakes up, a weak sun is just rising

  over the side of the valley. It is eight

  degrees below zero in the house.

  He builds a fire and makes tea. Puts out seeds

  for the birds and examines the tracks

  in fresh snow, still trying to learn

  what lives here. He is writing a poem

  when his friend calls. She asks what

  he plans to do today. To write some

  letters, he tells her (because he is falling

  behind in his project of writing one

  every day for a month).

  She tells him how many letters famous poets

  write each day. Says she doesn’t mean

  that as criticism. After they hang up,

  he stands looking at the unanswered mail

  heaped high on the table. Gets back

  in bed and starts reworking his poem.

  FLAT HEDGEHOGS

  For Isaiah Berlin

  When the hedgehogs here at night

  see a car and its fierce lights

  coming at them, they do the one

  big thing they know.

  PROSPERO LISTENING TO THE NIGHT

  The intricate vast process has produced

  a singularity which lies in darkness

  hearing the small owls, a donkey snorting

  in the barley field, and frogs down near

  the cove. What he is listening to is

  the muteness of the dog at each farm

  in the valley. Their silence means no

  lover is abroad nor any vagrant looking

  for where to sleep. But there is a young

  man, very still, under the heavy grapes

  in another part of Heaven. There are still

  women hoping behind the dark windows

  of farmhouses. Like he can hear himself not

  hearing Verdi. What else don’t the dogs know?

  THE END OF PARADISE

  When the angels found him sitting in the half light

  of his kerosene lamp eating lentils, his eyes widened.

  But all he said was could he leave a note. The one

  wearing black looked at the one in red who shrugged,

  so he began writing, desperately. Wadded the message

  into an envelope and wrote Anna on the front. Quickly

  began another, shoulders hunched, afraid of them.

  Finished and wrote Pimpaporn on it. Began a third

  one and the heavy angel growled. “I have Schubert,”

  the man offered, turning on the tape. The one in black

  said quietly that at least he didn’t say “So soon!”

  When the ink ran out, the man whimpered and struggled

  to the table piled with books and drafts. He finished

  again and scrawled Suzanne across it. The one in red

  growled again and the man said he would put on his shoes.

  When they took him out into the smell of dry vetch

  and the ocean, he began to hold back, pleading:

  “I didn’t put the addresses! I don’t want them to think

  I forgot.” “It doesn’t matter,” the better angel said,

  “they have been dead for years.”

  THE LOST WORLD

  Think what it was like, he said. Peggy Lee and Goodman

  all the time. Carl Ravazza making me crazy

  with “Vieni Su” from a ballroom in New Jersey

  every night, the radio filling my dark room

  in Pittsburgh with naked-shouldered women

  in black gowns. Helen Forrest and Helen O’Connell,

  and later the young Sarah Vaughan out of Chicago

  from midnight until two. Think of being fifteen

  in the middle of leafy June when Sinatra and Ray

  Eberle both had number one records of “Fools Rush In.”

  Somebody singing “Tenderly” and somebody doing

  “This Love of Mine.” Helplessly adolescent while

  the sound of romance was constantly everywhere.

  All day long out of windows along the street.

  Sinatra with “Close to You.” And all the bands. Artie

  Shaw with “Green Eyes” and whoever was always playing

  “Begin the Beguine.” Me desperate because I wouldn’t

  get there in time. Who can blame me for my heart?

  What choice did I have? Harry James with “Sleepy

  Lagoon.” Imagine, on a summer night, “Sleepy Lagoon”!

  MAYBE VERY HAPPY

  After she died he was seized

  by a great curiosity about what

  it was like for her. Not that he

  doubted how much she loved him.

  But he knew there must have been

  some things she had not liked.

  So he went to her closest friend

  and asked what she complained of.

  “It’s all right,” he had to keep

  saying, “I really won’t mind.”

  Until the friend finally gave in.

  “She said sometimes you made a noise

  drinking your tea if it was very hot.”

  THE MANGER OF INCIDENTALS

  We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.

  By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,

  power without consequence. The stubborn iteration

  that is present without being felt.

  Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon

  and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.

  No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.

  No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.

  The horror of none of it being alive.

  No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.

  Nothing that knows what season it is.

  The stars uninflected by awareness.

  Miming without implication. We alone see the iris

  in front of the cabin reach its perfection

  and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness

  and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed

  with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.

  We live the strangeness of being momentary,

  and still we are exalted by being temporary.

  The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,

  being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.

  We are a singularity that makes music out of noise

  because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness

  and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

  THE THIRTY FAVORITE LIVES: AMAGER

  I woke up every morning on the fourth floor,

  in the two-hundred-year-old walls made

  of plaster and river grass. I would leave

  the woman and walk across beautiful København

  to the island of Amager. To my small room

  in the leftover Nazi barracks that looked out

  on a swamp. Most of the time it was winter.

  I would light my hydrant-size iron stove

  and set a pot on top, putting in hamburger

  and vegetables while the water was getting hot.

  Starting to type with numb hands. The book

  I planned to write in two weeks for a thousand

  dollars already a week behind (and threatening

  to get beyond a month). Out of money and no

  prospects. Then the lovely smell of soup

  and the room snug. I would type all day

  and late into the night. Until the soup

  was finished. Then I would start back across

>   the frozen city, crunching over the moats,

  loud in the silence. The stars brilliant.

  Focused on her waiting for me, ready to fry

  sausages at two in the morning. Me thinking idly

  of the ancient Chinese poet writing in his

  poverty, “Ah, is this not happiness.”

  BURMA

  Used, misled, cheated. Our time always shortening.

  What we cherish always temporary. What we love

  is, sooner or later, changed. But for a while we can

  visit our other life. Can rejoice in its being there

  in its absence. Giving thanks for what we are allowed

  to think about it, grateful for it even as it wanes.

  For knowing it is there. The way women on rainy days

  sometimes go into the bedroom to cry about losing

  the first man they loved. The way a man remembers the young

  woman at an upstairs window looking out he saw once,

  for a moment, as he drove through a sleeping village.

  Or the brightness in the memory of the failed hotel

  where the waiters in their immaculate white uniforms

  were barefoot. The elegant dining room silent except for

  the sound of rain falling in the tin buckets. And

  the whispering of giant overhead fans with broken

  blades as they turned in the heat. There was the scraping

  sound in the piles of dead leaves on the lavish veranda.

  And occasionally the bright sound of broken glass.

  All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then.

  Like a giant bell ringing long after you can’t hear it.

  WHAT I’VE GOT

  After twenty hours in bed with no food, I decided

  I should have at least tea. Got up to light the lamp,

  but the sweating and shivering started again

  and I staggered backwards across the room. Slammed

  against the stone wall. Came to with blood on my head

  and couldn’t figure out which way the bed was.

  Crawled around searching for the matches but gave up,

  remembering there was one left in a box by the stove.

  It flared and went out. “Exaggerated,” I said