Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 16

by Jack Gilbert


  and groped back toward my desk, feeling for the matches

  with barefoot geisha steps. Began to shake and moan,

  my teeth chattering like the hero did in the old movie

  when his malaria returned. I smiled but was worried.

  No telephone and nobody going by out there in the field

  I could call to. And God knows what I had. Realized

  I was on all fours again. Interesting, something said

  as I dragged myself onto the bed. Interesting?

  another part said. Interesting! For Christ’s sake!

  TROUBLE

  That is what the Odyssey means.

  Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico

  raising peacocks for the rest of your life.

  The seriously happy heart is a problem.

  Not the easy excitement, but summer

  in the Mediterranean mixed with

  the rain and bitter cold of February

  on the Riviera, everything on fire

  in the violent winds. The pregnant heart

  is driven to hopes that are the wrong

  size for this world. Love is always

  disturbing in the heavenly kingdom.

  Eden cannot manage so much ambition.

  The kids ran from all over the piazza

  yelling and pointing and jeering

  at the young Saint Chrysostom

  standing dazed in the church doorway

  with the shining around his mouth

  where the Madonna had kissed him.

  IN THE BEGINNING

  In the morning when Eve and Adam

  woke to snow and their minds,

  they set out in marvelous clothes

  hand in hand under the trees.

  Endlessly precision met them,

  until they went grinning in time

  with no word for their close

  escape from that warm monotony.

  MÉTIER

  The Greek fishermen do not

  play on the beach and I don’t

  write funny poems.

  YELAPA

  Having swum in the jungle pool

  under the waterfall and struggled

  down again through the wattle huts,

  we still had three hours to wait

  before the boat would go back.

  The only foreigners had a gallery.

  She was British and naked in her halter.

  He also was standard, with his stubble

  and drunken talk of sex at ten

  in the morning. Telling us loudly

  how she stayed with him because

  of his three hundred a month. She waded

  through their old hatred picking up

  the sketches as each in turn blew down

  in the wind running before the storm.

  A TASTE FOR GRIT AND WHATEVER

  More and more it is the incidental that makes

  him yearn, and he worries about that.

  Why should the single railroad tracks

  curving away into the bare December trees

  and no houses matter? And why is it

  the defeated he trusts? Is it because

  Pittsburgh is still tangled in him that he

  has the picture on his wall of God’s head

  torn apart by jungle roots? Maybe

  growing up in that brutal city left him

  with a taste for grit and whatever it was

  he saw in the titanic rusting steel mills.

  It might be the reason he finally moved out

  of Paris. Perhaps it is the scale

  of those long-ago winters that makes him

  restless when people laugh a lot.

  Why the erotic matters so much. Not as

  pleasure but a way to get to something darker.

  Hunting down the soul, searching out the iron

  of Heaven when the work is getting done.

  MAYBE SHE IS HERE

  She might be here secretly.

  On her hands and knees

  with her head down a bit

  tilted to peer around the doorjamb

  in the morning, watching me

  before I wake up.

  Only her face showing

  and her shoulders. In a slip,

  her skin honey against the simple

  white of two thin straps

  and the worked edge of the bodice.

  With her right hand a little visible.

  THE DANCE

  MOST OF ALL

  [2009]

  EVERYWHERE AND FOREVER

  It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain

  flayed bare by the great sun. All around

  are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing

  the house was built by the king’s telegrapher.

  “To write at a distance.” He keeps the gate closed

  with a massive hasp and chain. The weeds inside

  are breast-high around the overgrown rosebushes

  and two plum trees. Beyond that, broad stairs

  rise to a handsome terrace and the fine house

  with its tall windows. He has excavated most

  of the courtyard in back. It’s there they

  spent their perfect days under a diseased

  grape arbor and the flowering jasmine. There is

  a faint sound of water from the pool over by

  the pomegranate tree with its exaggerated fruit.

  The basin is no longer choked by the leaves

  accumulated in the twelve years of vacancy.

  He has come to the right place at the right time.

  The blue Aegean is far down, and the slow ships

  far out. Doves fly without meaning overhead.

  He and the Japanese lady go out the back gate

  and up the stream stone by stone, bushes on each side

  heavy with moths. They come out under big plane trees.

  There is a dirt path from there to a nunnery.

  She says goodbye and he starts down to the village

  at the bottom where he will get their food for a week.

  The sky is vast overhead. Neither of them knows

  she is dying. He thinks of their eleven years together.

  Realizes they used up all that particular time

  everywhere in the cosmos, and forever.

  PAINTING ON PLATO’S WALL

  The shadows behind people walking

  in the bright piazza are not merely

  gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness

  is not the absence of badness.

  Goodness is a triumph. And so it is

  with love. Love is not the part

  we are born with that flowers

  a little and then wanes as we

  grow up. We cobble love together

  from this and those of our machinery

  until there is suddenly an apparition

  that never existed before. There it is,

  unaccountable. The woman and our

  desire are somehow turned into

  brandy by Athena’s tiny owl filling

  the darkness around an old villa

  on the mountain with its plaintive

  mewing. As a man might be

  turned into someone else while

  living kind of happy up there

  with the lady’s gentle dying.

  ALYOSHA

  The sound of women hidden

  among the lemon trees. A sweetness

  that can live with the mind, a family

  that does not wear away. He will let

  twenty lives pass and choose the twenty-

  first. He longs to live married to

  slowness. He lives now with the lambs

  the minute they are being born,

  lives with their perfection as they

  blunder around right away in pure innocence.

  He watches them go up the mountain

  each morning with the twelve-year-old

>   nearly child. Living with his faith

  as he watches them eaten at Easter

  to celebrate Christ. He is not innocent.

  He knows the shepherdess will be given

  to the awful man who lives at the farm

  closest to him. He blesses all of it

  as he mourns and the white doves soar

  silently in the perfect blue sky.

  WINTER IN THE NIGHT FIELDS

  I was getting water tonight

  off guard when I saw the moon

  in my bucket and was tempted

  by those Chinese poets

  and their immaculate pain.

  OVID IN TEARS

  Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.

  They asked him what he meant by garden.

  He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”

  he said, “there are places walled off where color

  and decorum are magnified into a civilization.

  Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like

  a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives

  and said garden was just a figure of speech,

  then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later

  he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne

  couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia

  Sophia and putting a round dome on a square

  base after nine hundred years of failure.

  The hand holding him slipped and he fell.

  “White stone in the white sunlight,” he said

  as they picked him up. “Not the great fires

  built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew

  fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody

  and the symphony. The imperfect dancing

  in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

  THE SPELL CAST OVER

  In the old days we could see nakedness only

  in the burlesque houses. In the lavish

  theaters left over from vaudeville,

  ruined in the Great Depression. What had been

  grand gestures of huge chandeliers

  and mythic heroes courting the goddess

  on the ceiling. Now the chandeliers were grimy

  and the ceilings hanging in tatters. It was

  like the Russian aristocrats fleeing

  the Revolution. Ending up as taxi drivers

  in Paris dressed in their worn-out elegance.

  It was like that in the Pittsburgh of my days.

  Old men of shabby clothes in the empty

  seats at the Roxy Theater dreaming

  of the sumptuous headliners

  slowly discarding layers of their

  lavish gowns. Baring the secret

  beauty to the men of their season.

  The old men came from their one room

  (with its single, forbidden gas range)

  to watch the strippers. To remember what used

  to be. Like the gray-haired men of Ilium

  who waited each morning for Helen

  to cross over to the temple in her light raiment.

  The waning men longed to escape from the spell

  cast over them by time. To escape the imprisoned

  longing. To insist on dispensation. To see

  their young hearts just one more time.

  Those famous women like honeycombs. Women moving

  to the old music again. That former grace of flesh.

  The sheen of them in the sunlight, to watch

  them walking by the sea.

  SOUTH

  For Susan Crosby Lawrence Anderson

  In the small towns along the river

  nothing happens day after long day.

  Summer weeks stalled forever,

  and long marriages always the same.

  Lives with only emergencies, births,

  and fishing for excitement. Then a ship

  comes out of the mist. Or comes around

  the bend carefully one morning

  in the rain, past the pines and shrubs.

  Arrives on a hot fragrant night,

  grandly, all lit up. Gone two days

  later, leaving fury in its wake.

  NEGLECTING THE KIDS

  He wonders why he can’t remember the blossoming.

  He can taste the brightness of the sour-cherry trees,

  but not the clamoring whiteness. He was seven in

  the first grade. He remembers two years later when

  they were alone in those rich days. He and his sister

  in what they called kindergarten.

  They played every day on the towering

  slate roofs. Barefoot. No one to see them on

  those fine days. He remembers the fear

  when they shot through the copper-sheeted

  tunnels through the house. The fear

  and joy and not getting hurt. Being tangled

  high up in the mansion’s Bing cherry tree with

  its luscious fruit. Remembers

  the lavish blooming. Remembers the caves they

  built in the cellar, in the masses of clothing and draperies.

  Tunnels to each other’s kingdom with their stolen

  jewelry and scarves. It was always summer, except for

  the night when his father suddenly appeared. Bursting

  in with crates of oranges or eggs, laughing in a way

  that thrilled them. The snowy night behind him.

  Who never brought two pounds of anything. The boy remembers

  the drunkenness but not how he felt about it,

  except for the Christmas when his father tried to embrace

  the tree when he came home. Thousands of lights,

  endless tinsel and ornaments. He does

  not remember any of it except the crash as his father

  went down. The end of something.

  DREAMING AT THE BALLET

  The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.

  They will do anything it’s true.

  And the skin is beautifully cared for.

  But they have no sense of it. They are

  all manner and amazing technique.

  I lie with them thinking of your

  foolish excess, of you panting

  and sweating, and your eyes after.

  ELEGY

  The bird on the other side of the valley

  sings cuckoo cuckoo and he sings back, inside,

  knowing what it meant to the Elizabethans.

  Hoping she is unfaithful now. Delicate

  and beautiful, making love with the Devil

  in his muggy bedroom behind the shabby office.

  While he is explaining the slums were there

  when he got the job. And the Buicks burning

  by the roads in the dark. He was not the one

  doing the judging, he says. Or the one pointing down

  at the lakes of burning lead. He is feeding

  her lemons. Holding shaved ice in his mouth

  and sucking her nipples to help with the heat.

  AFTER LOVE

  He is watching the music with his eyes closed.

  Hearing the piano like a man moving

  through the woods thinking by feeling.

  The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,

  step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,

  but always returning to quiet, like the man

  remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,

  mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure

  in the loss. In the yearning. The pain

  going this way and that. Never again.

  Never bodied again. Again the never.

  Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.

  A humming beauty in the silence.

  The having been. Having had. And the man

  knowing all of him will come to the end.

  WAITING AND FINDING

  While he was in kindergarten, everyb
ody wanted to play

  the tom-toms when it came time for that. You had to

  run in order to get there first, and he would not.

  So he always had a triangle. He does not remember

  how they played the tom-toms, but he sees clearly

  their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back

  and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.

  If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.

  You mostly waited while the tambourines and tom-toms

  went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all

  triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.

  Then it was tom-toms and waiting some more. But what

  he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,

  shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.

  Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost

  and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning

  without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,

  sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives

  silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting

  for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence

  as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.

  WINTER HAPPINESS IN GREECE

  The world is beyond us even as we own it.

  It is a hugeness in which we climb toward.

  A place only the wind knows, the kingdom

  of the moon which breathes a thousand years

  at a time. Our soul and the body hold each other

  tenderly in their arms like Charles Lamb

  and his sister walking again to the madhouse.

  Hand in hand, tears on their faces, him carrying

  her suitcase. Blow after blow on our heart

  as we grope through the flux for footholds,

  grabbing for things that won’t pull loose.

  They fail us time after time and we slide back

  without understanding where we are going.

  Remembering how the periodic table of the elements

  didn’t fit the evidence for half a century.

  Until they understood what isotopes were.

  MEANWHILE

 

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