Collected Poems

by Jack Gilbert

I live with the sound my body is,

  with the earth which is my daughter.

  And the clean separation which is my wife.

  There is no one who can control us

  because we live secretly under the ocean

  of each day. Except for the music.

  The memory of rainy afternoons

  in San Francisco when I would play

  all the slow sections of Mozart’s

  piano concertos. And the sound

  of the old Italian peasant who occasionally

  came down from the mountain to play

  a primitive kind of guttural bagpipe,

  and sometimes sing with his broken voice

  in the narrow lanes about the moon

  and the grief of lovers. That reedy sound

  is stuck in me. Like the Japanese monk

  who would come through the graveyard

  at night striking two sticks together.

  I can’t forget the pure sound I heard once

  when a violin string snapped nearby

  in three o’clock’s perfect silence.

  But I tell myself I’m safe. I remind myself

  of the boy who discovered order in the piano

  and ran upstairs to tell his little sister

  that they didn’t have to be afraid anymore.

  PIECING OF THE LIFE

  The man wondered if he had become

  like Di Stefano, when he was no longer able

  to sing the best of Verdi. He knew how better

  than anyone, but finally didn’t have the strength

  for Othello. My friend’s wife had left him

  and he wondered if he could still hold the world

  in his arms. And would he know if his quiet

  was the beginning of decline. He talked often

  of the first girl he kissed, when he was sixteen.

  He had not been prepared for the velvety

  plushness. We watched the evening begin.

  “Fifty and waning,” he said. Touched my arm and we

  walked slowly back. Silent and wonderfully content.

  NOT EASILY

  When we get beyond beauty and pleasure,

  to the other side of the heart (but short

  of the spirit), we are confused about what

  to do next. It is too easy to say arriving

  is enough. To pretend the music

  of the mountain needs only to be heard.

  That the dance is known by the dancing,

  and the lasagne is realized by eating it.

  Not in this place on the other side

  of desire. We can swim in the Aegean,

  but we can’t take it home. A man finds

  a melon by the road and continues up

  the hill thinking it is the warm melon

  that will remain after he has forgotten

  the ruins and sea of the summer. He tells

  himself this even as the idea of the taste

  is replacing what the melon tasted like.

  CROSSING THE BORDER, SEARCHING FOR THE CITY

  He thought of the boy in the middle

  of the poison gas. The gas mask dangerously

  slipping on his face, because he was sweating

  so much. (“Death on all sides.”) Fear all through him,

  but also the excitement from his intruding,

  because of the privacy he had penetrated.

  The hidden world he was not part of.

  Glimpsed all his life in the windows he walked past

  at night. The young mother dancing slowly

  with her little daughter. The teenager preening

  in her new dress in front of her father.

  The world without him he was seeing as he

  opened cupboards and pulled clothes

  from the bureaus. Drawers of the daughter’s

  mysterious underclothes. What they had on

  the dresser. Curiously the same as his rummaging

  earlier in the refrigerator for the food

  to put on the porch. Finding what had gotten

  lost, shriveled, or spoiled. All his life wondering

  what reality was, without his presence.

  Lying in somebody’s side lawn, the night rain

  coming down and the smell of lilacs

  as he watched a family eating dinner in their light.

  Later the Hispanic women in the Laundromats.

  And in Rome, when he lived with the peasants

  from Calabria. Never a part of it

  despite their friendship. Now in the village

  of black magic with tokens among the trees

  announcing which paths led to death. Trying

  to decide about the Australian woman

  beside him. The borders again, he thinks,

  remembering the woman in København he had

  never seen as he slid out of the terrible

  cold into her sleepy warmth. Her face

  invisible in the dark. The soft sound

  she made welcoming him wordlessly,

  utterly. Into the great light of her body.

  CRUSOE ON THE MOUNTAIN GATHERING FAGGOTS

  He gets dead sage and stalks of weeds mostly.

  Oleander can kill a fire, they say.

  The length of valley below is green

  where the grapes are. The small farms

  of wheat tiny. And two separate cows.

  Then the sea. Here’s a terraced mountain

  abandoned to bracken and furze and not

  even that. If there was water once,

  there isn’t now. Rock and hammering sun.

  He tastes all of it again and again,

  his madeleine. He followed that clue

  so long it grew faint. Which must account

  for his happiness in this wrong terrain.

  SUMMER AT BLUE CREEK, NORTH CAROLINA

  There was no water at my grandfather’s

  when I was a kid and would go for it

  with two zinc buckets. Down the path,

  past the cow by the foundation where

  the fine people’s house was before

  they arranged to have it burned down.

  To the neighbor’s cool well. Would

  come back with pails too heavy,

  so my mouth pulled out of shape.

  I see myself, but from the outside.

  I keep trying to feel who I was,

  and cannot. Hear clearly the sound

  the bucket made hitting the sides

  of the stone well going down,

  but never the sound of me.

  GOING HOME

  Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.

  And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia

  merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.

  He ran away with the circus at fourteen.

  Neither one got through grammar school.

  And here I am in the faculty toilet

  trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

  GETTING IT RIGHT

  Lying in front of the house all

  afternoon, trying to write a poem.

  Falling asleep.

  Waking up under the stars.

  ALONENESS

  Deep inside the night on the eighth floor.

  Scared to be alone with him in his room.

  Hoping the drug still controls his violence.

  The massiveness of him. The girth

  of the wrist as he holds it. And the sound

  of his heart. In the corridor outside,

  blank eyes at each of the small windows.

  The silence getting denser and denser

  as it continues farther away.

  Everywhere the sighing of the beds

  rocking slowly, steadily, eternally

  in the hushed dimness as he reaches in

  to the hot bed of the contagious fat woman

  to turn her over. Him frightened in

  the paper
clothes and a mask.

  They give him a dead woman swathed

  tightly in loop after loop of brown tape,

  from the crown of her head down

  to the toes. Like a mummy under water.

  Wrestling with it in the concrete basement.

  The weight of her slack body pulling

  out of his arms. Lifting her with difficulty

  by hugging the body against him. Shocked

  at the dead thing’s heat. Fighting to get

  her into the immaculate drawer. The sound

  of steel sliding on steel.

  The straight-edge razors they use on

  Saturday nights slash so fast and clean

  there is no pain. They fight on without

  noticing the mutilation. Ears gone, noses

  carved, cheeks laid bare. Standing in line

  later to be neatly staunched and stitched.

  FEELING HISTORY

  Got up before the light this morning

  and went through the sweet damp chill

  down to the mindlessly persisting sea.

  Stood neck-deep in its strength thinking

  it was the same water young Aristotle

  knew before he stopped laughing.

  The cold waves came in on me,

  came in as the sun went from red

  to white. All the sea turned blue

  as I walked back past the isolate

  shuttered villa.

  TO KNOW THE INVISIBLE

  The Americans tried and tried to see

  the invisible Indians in the deeper jungle

  of Brazil. Finally they put things in the clearing

  and waited. They waited for months,

  maybe for years. Until a knife and a pot

  disappeared. They put out other things

  and some of those vanished. Then one morning

  there was a jungle offering sitting on the ground.

  Gradually they began to know the invisible

  by the jungle’s choices. Even when nothing

  replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing.

  Like the woman you camp outside of, at the five portals.

  Attending the conduits that tunnel from the apparatus

  down to the capital of her. Through the body

  and its weather, to the mind and heart, to the spirit

  beyond. To the mystery. And gradually to the ghosts

  coming and leaving. To the difference between

  the nightingale and the Japanese nightingale

  which is not a nightingale. Getting lost in the treachery

  of language, waylaid by the rain dancing its pavane

  in the bruised light of winter afternoons.

  By the flesh, luminous and transparent in the silent

  clearing of her. Love as two spirits flickering

  at the edge of meeting. An apartment on the third

  floor without an elevator, white walls and almost

  no furniture. Water seen through pine trees.

  Love like the smell of basil. Richness beyond

  anyone’s ability to cope with. The way love is after fifty.

  PROSPERO GOES HOME

  It was not difficult to persuade the captain

  to sail a little off course and leave him

  at the island. With his boxes on the sand

  and the ship getting small, he was home.

  Foolishly, he was disappointed that Ariel

  was not amazingly there to meet him.

  A part had secretly dreamed it would be a woman.

  But that lasted briefly and then he was happy.

  How dear the bare place looked. How good it felt

  getting the supplies up to the house.

  NAKED WITHOUT INTENT

  She takes off her clothes without excitement.

  Her eyes don’t know what to do. There is silence

  in the countries of her body, Umbrian hill towns

  under those small ribs, foreign voices singing

  in the distance of her back. She is invisible

  under the glare of her nudity. Somewhere there

  is a table and the chairs she will go back to.

  These men will never know what station the radio

  is already set on. She will leave soon and find

  herself walking in the streets with the few

  people who are still awake. She will enter

  her room tired and a little confused by the night.

  Confused by their seeing her utterly, seeing

  everything but the simple fact of her. Tomorrow

  she will be in a supermarket buying potatoes

  and milk, mostly naked under her dress and maybe

  different. Strangers around the city will know

  the delicate colors of her nipples. Some will

  remember her long feet. Will she feel special

  now as she sets the alarm? Is there a danger she

  might feel that nothing significant happened?

  TRYING

  Our lives are hard to know. The gardens are provisional,

  and according to which moment. Whether in the burgeoning

  of July or the strict beauty of January. The language

  itself is mutable. The word way is equally an avenue

  and a matter of being. Our way into the woods

  is according to the speed. To stroll into loveliness,

  or leaves blowing so fast they would shred

  birds in an explosion of blood. It’s the Devil’s

  mathematics that Blake spoke of, which I failed

  all three times. Everyone remembers the wonderful day

  in Canada when the water was perfect. I remember

  the Italian afternoon when I carried Gianna on my shoulders

  in the pool, her thighs straining around my head.

  My falling awkwardly and getting water in my nose.

  The embarrassment forty-nine years ago which I have rejoiced in.

  “To war with a god-lover is not war,” Edith Hamilton wrote,

  “it is despair.” What of the terribly poor Monet

  scrounging for the almost empty tubes of paint his students

  left. Or Watteau dying so long near Versailles. Always

  the music of the court and the taste of his beautiful

  goddesses constantly going away.

  THE ANSWER

  Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving

  or an emptying out? If the heart persists

  in waiting, does it begin to lessen?

  If we are always good does God lose track

  of us? When I wake at night, there is

  something important there. Like the humming

  of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations

  in the slums. There is a silence in me,

  absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted

  by the day I walked through the Greek village

  where everyone was asleep and somebody began

  playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside

  the upper floor of a plain white stone house.

  THE GROS VENTRE

  The bright green of the flat fields stretching away

  endlessly under the procession of great white clouds.

  A ceremony without punctuation. The land empty

  except for the way Chief Joseph ended just short

  of the Canadian border.

  He did not talk to them

  about that, or how the tribe dwindled away amid

  the immaculate silence. (As we did after

  leaving college.) He did not talk to the young

  about sweat lodges, or the pipe ceremony. He talked

  about how America was born from the size around them,

  the American mind and its spirit shaped by that

  scale. They said it was just distance for them.

  And boredom. How small it made them feel.

  He asked about their old poetry, saying he could />
  not understand how it worked. They said they had never

  read any of that. He talked about imagination,

  as something hard. He began to hear their minds flickering.

  An old woman showed him the big photographs she had

  bought from the government of their great men.

  She said she was one of the last three people who could

  speak the language, and she would die soon. He felt

  the doom everywhere. They were like a kind of whale

  that was so scant it could never replace itself.

  Hearing about the drunkenness and drugs and incest

  each day. Then the amazing stars at night. Riding

  around all day with the woman from the foundation

  that had brought him there. Getting to know her

  as they roamed through the ideal landscape. Lunch

  and dinner together all the time. She talking about

  her Irish family and growing up in New York. About

  the man she lived with. Getting somebody to take

  their picture. His heart flickering. His surprise.

  His heart that had retired, safe in ripeness, hidden

  in the light. Standing together in the terminal,

  her plane straight ahead, his to the left. Both of them

  stranded without a language for it.

  WAKING AT NIGHT

  The blue river is gray at morning

  and evening. There is twilight

  at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark

  wondering if this quiet in me now

  is a beginning or an end.

  CHERISHING WHAT ISN’T

  Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this

  long life, along with the few others.

  And the four I may have loved, or stopped short

  of loving. I wander through these woods

  making songs of you. Some of regret, some

  of longing, and a terrible one of death.

  I carry the privacy of your bodies

  and hearts in me. The shameful ardor

  and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds

  of happiness and the walled‑up childhoods.

  I carol loudly of you among trees emptied

  of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.