Collected Poems

by Jack Gilbert

  It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees

  along the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time.

  In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.

  Now it waits in New England while I say grace over

  almost everything: for a possum dead on someone’s lawn,

  the single light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,

  and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets

  are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side

  with barley. Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America.

  The heart is a foreign country whose language none

  of us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods,

  but already it looks discarded as the birds return

  and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power

  or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.

  My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing

  and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.

  THE ABUNDANT LITTLE

  We have seen the population of Heaven

  in frescoes. Dominions and unsmiling saints

  crowded together as though the rooms were small.

  We think of the grand forests of Pennsylvania,

  oaks and maples, when we see the miniatures

  of blue Krishna with farm girls awkwardly

  beside a pond in a glade of scrub trees.

  The Japanese scrolls show mostly Hell.

  When we read about the Christian paradise,

  it is made of gold and pearls, built on

  a foundation of emeralds. Nothing soft

  and rarely trees, except in the canvases

  of Italians where they slip in bits of Tuscany

  and Perugino’s Umbria. All things

  are taken away. Indeed, indeed.

  But we secretly think of our bodies

  in the heart’s storm and just after.

  And the sound of careless happiness.

  We touch finally only a little.

  Like the shy tongue that comes fleetingly

  in the dark. The acute little that is there.

  WORTH

  It astonished him when he got to Kathmandu to hear

  the man from the embassy say a friend was waiting

  outside of customs. It was the Australian woman

  he had met in Bali. His fault for running back

  across the tarmac when he realized she was crying.

  Kissing her while the plane waited with the door open.

  Wanting her to feel valuable. Now she had used up all

  her money flying to Nepal. In trouble because

  we can’t parse the heart. Calling what had been

  what it was not. Now lying awkwardly on the bed

  for a month, marooned in the heat, the Himalayas

  above the window. As he watched the delicate dawns

  and the old women carrying too much firewood down

  from the mountain on their backs. Him thinking of their

  happiness up in the lush green terraces of rice.

  Remembering her laughter as he came out of the shower,

  saying the boy had come again with a plate of melon.

  “He asked if you were my husband,” she said, “and I

  said you were my father.” Her eyes merry. Now they sat

  in cheap restaurants trying to find anything to say.

  Remembering how beautiful she was the first time

  coming through the palm trees of the compound at dusk.

  Tall and thin in a purple dress that reached to her

  bare feet. Watching while he played chess with

  the Austrian photographer all night. Now calling

  that good thing by the wrong name. Destroying

  something valuable. Innocently killing backwards.

  PERFECTED

  In the outskirts of the town

  the street sweeper puts down

  his broom of faggots and angrily

  begins to shake the young ginkgo.

  The leaves fall faster.

  He shakes it even harder

  and the leaves fall by ones and twos.

  He rests to calm himself.

  A passing boy speeds up

  and leaps in the air,

  slamming the trunk with both feet.

  The yellow leaves spurt out.

  The three of them stand looking up.

  One leaf falls, then more.

  LIVING HUNGRY AFTER

  The water nymphs who came to Poseidon

  explained how little they desired to couple

  with the gods. Except to find out

  whether it was different, whether there was

  a fresh world, another dimension in their loins.

  In the old Pittsburgh we dreamed of a city

  where women read Proust in the original French,

  and wondered whether we would cross over

  into a different joy if we paid a call girl

  a thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour.

  Would it be different in kind or only

  tricks and apparatus? I worried that a great

  love might make everything else an exile.

  It turned out that being together

  at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria

  did, indeed, measure everything after that.

  THE MISTAKE

  There is always the harrowing by mortality,

  the strafing by age, he thinks. Always defeats.

  Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alive

  in the difficult way adults want to be alive.

  It is worth having the heart broken,

  a blessing to hurt for eighteen years

  because a woman is dead. He thinks of long

  before that, the summer he was with Gianna

  and her sister in Apulia. Having outwitted

  the General, their father, and driven south

  to the estate of the Contessa. Like an opera.

  The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.

  Houses of the peasants burrowed into the walls

  of the compound. A butler with white gloves

  serving chicken in aspic. The pretty maid

  in her uniform bringing his breakfast each

  morning on a silver tray: toast both light

  and dark, hot chocolate and tea both. A world

  like Tosca. A feudal world crushed under

  the weight of passion without feeling.

  Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.

  The young man wild with romance and appetite.

  Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.

  A FACT

  The woman is not just a pleasure,

  nor even a problem. She is a meniscus

  that allows the absolute to have a shape,

  that lets him skate however briefly

  on the mystery, her presence luminous

  on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor

  at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets

  after summer rain on maples and sycamore.

  As well as the car suddenly crossing two blocks

  away in a blare of light. The importance

  of the rocks around his Greek shepherd hut,

  and mules wandering around in the empty fields.

  He crosses the island in the giant sunlight,

  comes back in the dark thinking of the woman.

  The fact of her goes on, loved or not.

  BECOMING REGARDLESS

  I begin to see them again as the twilight darkens.

  Gathered below me and to the right under the tree.

  Ghosts are by their nature drawn to the willows.

  They have no feet and hover just above the grass.

  They seem to be singing. About apples, I think,

  as I remember the ones a children’s red in the old

  cemetery in Syra
cuse where I would eat one each day

  because the tree grew out of a grave and I liked

  to think of someone eating what was left of my heart

  and spirit as I lay in the dark earth translating

  into fruit. I can’t be sure what they are singing

  because no sound comes through the immense windows

  of my apartment. (Except for the sound somebody

  makes at two and four in the night as he passes

  around what was the temple grounds hitting a block

  of wood two or three times with a stick. I have

  begun listening for it as I lie on the floor awake.)

  I try to see in what is left of the light down there

  the two I was. The ghost of the boy in high school

  just before I became myself. The other is the ghost

  of the times later when I could fall in love:

  the first time, and three years after that for eight

  years, and the last time ten years after. I feel

  a great tenderness for all the dozen ghosts down

  there trying to remain what they were. Behind each

  pile of three boulders that are the gravestones

  is a railing making an enclosure for the seven-foot,

  narrow, unpainted planks with prayers written on them.

  They are brought on the two ceremonial days each year

  by the mourners and put with the earlier ones. But

  in many enclosures there are just weathered old ones,

  because they are brought only as long as there is

  still someone who knew the dead. It puzzles me that

  I care so much for the ghost of the boy in high school,

  since I am not interested in those times. But I know

  why the other one frightens me. He is the question

  about whether the loves were phantoms of what existed

  as appearance only. I know how easily they come,

  summoned by our yearning. I realize the luminosity

  can be a product of our heart’s furnace. It would

  erase my life to find I made it up. Then I see them

  faintly dancing in the dark: spirits that are the invisible

  presence of what those women were. There once was

  a Venezia even if there is not now. The flesh thickens

  or wanes, but there was somebody I knew truly. Three

  of them singing under the willow inside my transience.

  THE SECRET

  There is an easy beauty in the bronze statues

  dredged up from the ocean, but there is a worth

  to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on.

  Truth is like a pearl, Francis Bacon said.

  It is lovely in clear light, but the carbuncle

  is more precious because its deep red shows best

  in varied illumination. “A mixture of a lie

  doth ever add pleasure.” When the Chinese made

  a circle of stones on the top of their wells,

  one would be a little skewed to make the circle

  look more round. Irregularity is the secret

  of music and to the voice of great poetry.

  When a man remembers the beauty of his lost love,

  it is the imperfect bit of her he remembers most.

  The blown‑up Parthenon is augmented by its damage.

  THE NEW BRIDE ALMOST VISIBLE IN LATIN

  We want to believe that what happens

  in the dark bedroom is normal.

  Pretending that being alive

  is reasonable keeps the door shut

  against whether maggots, nematodes,

  and rot are also created in God’s image.

  Our excess is measured, our passion

  almost deliberate. As we grow up,

  we more and more love appropriately.

  When Alicia got married, the priest

  conducted the Mass in English because

  it was understandable. He faced us

  as though we were friends. Had us

  gather around the altar afterwards.

  She hugged and kissed each one until me.

  The bride, fresh from Communion,

  kissed me deeply with her tongue,

  her husband three feet away.

  The great portals of our knowing

  each other closed forever. I was flooded

  by the size of what had ended.

  But it was the mystery of marriage

  and its hugeness that shocked me,

  fell on me like an ox. I felt

  mortality mixing with the fragrance

  of my intimacy with her. The difference

  between the garden of her body

  and the presence of her being was the same

  distance as the clear English of the Mass from

  the blank Latin which held the immensities.

  THE DANGER OF WISDOM

  We learn to live without passion.

  To be reasonable. We go hungry

  amid the giant granaries

  this world is. We store up plenty

  for when we are old and mild.

  It is our strength that deprives us.

  Like Keats listening to the doctor

  who said the best thing for

  tuberculosis was to eat only one

  slice of bread and a fragment

  of fish each day. Keats starved

  himself to death because he yearned

  so desperately to feast on Fanny Brawne.

  Emerson and his wife decided to make

  love sparingly in order to accumulate

  his passion. We are taught to be

  moderate. To live intelligently.

  SEARCHING FOR IT IN A GUADALAJARA

  DANCE HALL

  You go in from the cobbled back street.

  Into an empty, concrete one-room building

  where prim youngish women sit in a line

  of straight chairs. The women are wearing

  tea dresses thrown away by rich Texan

  women two generations ago. The men are

  peasants, awkward in a line of chairs opposite.

  Nothing is sexual. There are proprieties.

  No rubbing against anyone. No touching

  at all. When the music starts, the men

  go stiffly over to the women. It isn’t

  clear whether they say anything. The dance is

  a slow, solemn fox trot. When it stops,

  they stand still while the men

  find a coin. The women stow it and all

  of them go back to the chairs to wait for

  the music and another partner. This is

  not for love. The men can get love

  for two coins at a shack in the next field.

  They know about that. And that they will

  never be married, because it is impossible

  to own even a little land. They are

  groping for something else, but don’t know what.

  TRIANGULATING

  All taken down like Trastevere or København.

  Like her apartment on Waller in San Francisco

  or their place on Oak. The ruined cities

  of America. The grand theaters built for vaudeville,

  tawdry and soiled when he knew

  them in Baltimore and Chicago. Full of

  raggedness and a band. Calumet City when

  it was a mob town with public vice.

  A scale visible in the decay. Something

  to measure against. Night after night

  walking the Paris he knew. Hôtel Duc de Bourgogne

  on Île Saint-Louis, the room

  with a stone floor on the rue Boutarel across from

  the cathedral. The old building where

  his mansard was on a hill above the canal.

  All taken down. Places that were clues

  for a moment when he understood.

  Knew the name of our qua
rry.

  The something we were changing into.

  THE DIFFICULT BEAUTY

  The air full of pictures no matter where you reach in.

  Vast caverns in the ground bright with electricity

  and covered everywhere with language. Because you

  live on the fourth floor, you can on Sundays look

  down into the synagogue across the street where people

  sing secretly together in Spanish. You are up there

  trying to get the galleys marked which are so late

  (because of love) that Yale threatens not to publish

  the book at all. Noise so loud you finally look

  outside and see everybody gathered on Fourth Street

  near Avenue C to eat ice cream and watch the guys

  carrying a naked woman down the fire escape clumsily

  who had been promising all morning to jump. But best

  of all are the gardens: hidden places where they have

  burned down the buildings and kept the soil

  poor so the plants won’t grow with vulgar abundance.

  Like the Japanese gardens made only of rocks and sand

  so their beauty would not be obscured by appearances.

  Like the maharaja who set aside the best courtyards

  in his palace for the dandelions he imported from

  England to be kept alive by the finest gardeners

  in the world who knew how to work against nature.

  GROWING UP IN PITTSBURGH

  Go down to the drugstore at the corner,

  it said. At the drugstore it said,

  Go to the old woman’s house. On her porch

  was scribbled: Where has love gone?

  To the arcades of the moon, I wrote.

  To the Palladian moon, and is embezzled

  there as well. Therefore are the gunwales

  of my heart plated. For the birds

  have rings on their necks and must

  take the catch to the white boats

  at the marble pier in exchange for gruel.

  Old hoplites cursing under the arcades

  snap the pale fish and wrap them in plundered

  drawings. A whimpering leaks from the bundles,

  from the stalls, into the piazza and up

  to the roof where everyone in the shining

  is watching a performance of romance.

  INFECTIOUS