Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 19

by Jack Gilbert


  A score of women if you count love both large

  and small, real ones that were brief

  and those that lasted. Gentle love and some

  almost like an animal with its prey.

  What is left is what’s alive in me. The failing

  of your beauty and its remaining.

  You are like countries in which my love

  took place. Like a bell in the trees

  that makes your music in each wind that moves.

  A music composed of what you have forgotten.

  That will end with my ending.

  VALLEY OF THE SPIRITS

  Not for rhyme or reason, but for the heart’s

  sweet seasons and her perfect back sleeping

  in the morning dark.

  SUDDENLY ADULT

  The train’s stopping wakes me.

  Weeds in the gully are white

  with the year’s first snow.

  A lighted train goes

  slowly past absolutely empty.

  Also going to Fukuoka.

  I feel around in myself

  to see if I mind. Maybe

  I am lonely. It is hard

  to know. It could be

  hidden in familiarity.

  WE ARE THE JUNCTION

  The body is the herb,

  the mind is the honey.

  The heart, the heart is

  the undifferentiated.

  The mind touches the body

  and is the sun.

  The mind touches the heart

  and is music.

  When body touches heart

  they together are the moon

  in the silently falling snow

  over there. Which is truth

  exceeding, is the residence,

  the sanctified, is the secret

  closet and passes into glory.

  UNCOLLECTED

  POEMS

  VALLEY OF THE OWLS

  Night rises up from the fields

  as the stars gather. Under the earth

  are the stones and holding the stones

  together is the silence. His heart

  smelling of the cypress tree.

  The whole valley at dawn sweet

  with its emptiness. There is a door

  in the wind, lima bean soup on the stove.

  Tomorrow begins in the dark.

  Today is the mountain of what we have

  become. Surprised to be alive

  in the abundance of time. Two thousand

  six hundred and twenty days,

  four thousand nights another time.

  The red on the large woodpecker

  four times in the pine trees.

  The hoopoe in the chinaberry tree

  only once. Wang Wei in his loneliness

  noticing the first raindrops

  in the light dust.

  THIS TIMES THAT

  The silence around the old villa

  was magnified by the shrilling

  cicadas. Her soft voice redoubled

  that stillness. At night the two

  kinds of owls did not consider

  each other but together made

  something. The small owl mewed

  and the other said dark . . . dark.

  How fine it was up there on

  the mountain. How happy Michiko

  was. She was perishing but did

  not know it. I took care of her

  body in ways that crossed over

  the boundaries of politeness.

  The white ship that crossed slowly

  to the next island every noon

  doubled the blue of the Aegean.

  Her absence makes this New England

  town completely visible and less.

  SPRING

  I call it exile, or being relegated.

  I call it the provinces.

  And all the time it is my heart.

  My imperfect heart which prefers

  this distance from people. Prefers

  the half-meetings which cannot lead

  to intimacy. Provisional friendships

  that are interrupted near the beginning.

  A pleasure in not communicating.

  And inside, no despair or longing.

  A taste for solitude. The knowledge

  that love preserves freedom in always

  failing. An exile by nature. Where,

  indeed, would I ever be a citizen?

  A MAN IN BLACK AND WHITE

  There was a small butcher shop in the North End

  of Boston whose specialty was inferior foods.

  Chicken feet and chicken heads. Gizzards, tripe

  and beef hearts. Salty fatback and wet brains.

  Prosperous people came from the suburbs to pay

  too much for the food they ate in hard times.

  The man living with difficulty in the winter woods

  remembers as he looks at the fresh raccoon tracks

  in the snow and wonders if they will tug at him

  in the Mediterranean light, if he will write

  about the classical bareness of cold and truth

  while eating the suckling pig and fried bananas

  of Indonesia. Will he miss the Mill River

  with its slags of ice and the sound of crows

  in the silence. Some years ago, a child was asked

  whether he liked radio or television best. The boy

  said radio, because the pictures were better.

  WINTER HAPPINESS

  Pride, pride, pride, pride, pride,

  pride and happiness. Winter

  and empty fields and beyond the trees

  the Aegean. The night sky

  bright in the puddles of this lane.

  Such dear loneliness. Going along

  to no man’s clock. No one who knows

  my middle name for a thousand miles.

  My youth gone and death unable to find me.

  Thinking back to childhood. Astonished

  that I could find the way here.

  MAY I, MAY I

  Mother says,

  Take two baby steps.

  The eyes and inside the mouth,

  nipples and naked feet.

  Dreams lived and lost

  as the great secret.

  Mother may I, he says

  and she lets him.

  Cold rooms in Manhattan

  and San Francisco.

  First love for the second time.

  All night every night

  in coffeehouse and bar.

  Poetry and painting,

  hunger and movies,

  disappointment and lies.

  Happy and alone.

  Take two baby steps,

  Mother says. Spring and forest,

  music and trains and owls.

  Denise and Doris, Marie

  and Moira, Anna and Valerie.

  Ah, Mother, may I?

  and she says You may.

  A little success. Dinners

  and famous names.

  Then giant steps away

  from all that.

  From the simplicity.

  Mother says, Take your heart

  in both hands and squeeze

  out darkness. You must take

  scissor steps down

  into longing and forgetting,

  loneliness and fear.

  Mother must I?

  You must.

  People’s agony and the injustice.

  Your aging and listening.

  Sickness and death.

  The imperfecting.

  Mother, he says, there is arriving

  down here. Enjoyment

  more than excitement.

  Having been and being.

  Happiness and ripeness

  for all the time there is.

  Italy and Greece when they are

  spoiled and splendid.

  THE WINNOWING

  Their daughter makes a noise like
a giant fly.

  The family brought her today for the threshing.

  She grew up here until they moved to the village.

  She takes me around to see the geranium sprigs

  she tried to plant while I did the laundry.

  With a circle of stones to make a house for each.

  Grins when I dribble water on them obediently

  where she points. She is twenty and misshapen

  and cannot speak. Sits on the wall wearing pink,

  rocking in the quiet sound of grain being sifted.

  Shadows of my doves fly across the bright stones

  as she looks down the valley singing and happy

  in the late afternoon. A very big happiness I think.

  THIRTY FAVORITE TIMES

  The last year of my being young the way young people

  mean young, I was living with a friend in Perugia,

  one of those Italian towns made of towers and arches

  and Etruscan walls. Down below was gentle Umbria

  and summer was coming. Both of us were unhappy.

  His love was in Austria and mine was in Berkeley,

  and neither of them wanted us now. Every night

  we sat in the kitchen at a marble table writing fine

  hopeless letters to get them back. His wife cooked

  and comforted us and went to bed about one when

  we began decorating the envelopes. I would finish first

  and take mine to the post office through the sleeping

  ancient city. Usually about three in the morning.

  Then I would go to the dark palazzo and stand looking

  up at Gianna’s bedroom window. When I got home,

  his pretty letter would be leaning on the sugar bowl.

  I would go quietly across their bedroom to my door.

  She would be sitting up holding him in her arms,

  watching me as I passed through the first light of dawn.

  BLINDED BY SEEING

  I was lying on the deck with my eyes closed.

  Somewhere to the left the women’s voices began

  to change, the voice of one pushing the others.

  She idly sang bits of old songs, laughing

  as though not noticing. And began to clap,

  accentuating the rhythm, crying out.

  Her laughing became a gypsy laugh, though I could

  hear a shyness underneath. I could hear how

  she was as a girl when the men would have urged her on

  until she danced, dazzling the whole village.

  But these women fell silent. The men nearby

  went on playing cards and she gradually stopped.

  Later, when I went for tea, I returned that way

  to see her spirit in its full-breasted body.

  But there was only a group of old ladies

  dressed in black, each like the others.

  THE GREEK GODS DON’T COME IN WINTER

  The Greek gods don’t come in winter,

  and seldom in person. They speak through

  others. Even in summer. Their voices seem

  far off and very fast. It’s difficult also

  because we can’t trust the people who say

  they are translating. When the gods come

  in the dawn, there is soon the odor

  of roses and warm linen. They sit in their

  high-backed chairs and mostly watch

  the children. Especially when they are

  running and laughing. They applaud

  by humming when we read our poems.

  They hum differently when the poems

  are about lights and parallel geologies

  of the sea. But they hum most of all

  when the poems are about distance and desire.

  THE CARGO AND THE EQUITY

  A man lies warm under the blankets in a house still

  frozen by the night, trying to remember the dream.

  A lovely Japanese lady with bare breasts in a palanquin.

  It changed and he was crowded against a fat man while

  talking with a young woman from California at a party

  who was beginning to tell him what she believed.

  “Honor rather than bravery for instance,” she said.

  (He can hear the slow freight passing through

  the ruined cornfields down by the river.) Dreams are

  mostly things that we let go. What memory really keeps

  is the cargo, the equity we have in our life.

  He remembers an almost full moon white in the pale

  afternoon sky yesterday and the snow gleaming

  in the silence of gray winter light. He thinks

  of a bright New England window last week where

  a young mother was singing with her children.

  And the lighted window near Hampstead Heath years ago

  where a naked adolescent girl was laughing sweetly

  with a man who was probably her father, holding up

  her pretty dress, getting ready to go dancing with

  the boy she loved. Any of that heartbreaking abundance.

  THE STOCKTON TUNNEL

  Someone had left a door unlocked in the Stockton

  Tunnel and I went through almost without thinking.

  Inside was a vast construction of Byzantium.

  It must fill all of San Francisco down there,

  shining with beautiful stone light. The watchman

  was drunk, and annoyed by something they’d done.

  He began telling secrets about the Leader and the order

  and imminent takeovers. Most of which I couldn’t follow

  because of the whispering and looking away.

  He changed after we’d crawled out on the scaffolding.

  Wanted to attach electrical things to my earlobes.

  It mattered a lot to him. When I still refused,

  he started yelling and kicking the towers.

  Harder and harder until a dim moaning began below

  and timid voices floating up the mighty names

  of the Paleologi, frail and lovely on the damp, spoiled air.

  HOLDING ON TO MY FRIEND

  The funeral service was people getting up

  in the church and saying wonderful things

  about my friend. The next night, the family

  and some others gathered in the West Village

  condominium and told flattering stories.

  His daughter said Dad was always fun to be with.

  I knew him well for thirty years and he had

  never been fun, unless you counted those times

  he struggled stubbornly to get the hang of charm.

  My friend was fat and mean and lonely.

  He made lots of money and never got anything

  he really wanted. Most unhappy man I ever met.

  There was resentment and even dislike in his

  love for me. But we managed, knowing that.

  We would spend long evenings reviewing again

  his first marriage. Then he’d make his speech

  about therapy teaching him how to express anger.

  Afterwards, we would sit sleepy and silent

  in the lavishness, embarrassed by our tenderness.

  When I dream of him now, years later, he’s driving

  me to the airport, or we are on Fifth Avenue

  near Rockefeller Center with him explaining again

  how to reach Columbus Circle. We stand on,

  talking of nothing. Comfortable, as the snow

  falls the way it did in the old Pittsburgh.

  SECRETS OF POETRY

  People complain about too many moons in my poetry.

  Even my friends ask why I keep putting in the moon.

  And I wish I had an answer like when Archie Moore

  was asked by a reporter in the dressing room

  after the fight, “Why did you keep looking in

  his eyes, Archie? Th
e whole fight you were

  looking in his eyes.” And old Archie Moore said,

  “Because the eyes are the windows of the soul, man.”

  ARS POETICA

  He tries to tell the doctor:

  “My heart springs open and I see

  there is a woods inside.

  The trees are full of birds

  but they are unable to sing.”

  It’s a good sign, the doctor says.

  “My body begins to shine

  brighter and brighter.

  In the center of the light

  there is a transparent woman

  yelling, Go back! Go back!”

  The doctor says that’s promising.

  “No,” he says, “all of you lie to me.

  Like the night they came to get me

  out of bed at four in the morning.

  Because Marmarosa wouldn’t play

  anymore. Unless I was there, they said.

  “It was one of those blind pig places

  I remember. And he made something perfect.

  Made an architecture with the piano.

  Like one of those buildings by Palladio.

  But when he came to my table he was

  as crazy as before. Like after Los Angeles.

  “We left and walked through the empty streets

  of East Liberty afterwards. Just before

  it got light, Dodo in pain and mumbling.

  It’s what you’re good at they use

  to destroy you he said.”

  The doctor says Dodo was feeling

  a little down because they took

  away his children. “No, no!” he insists.

  “I remember what Dodo was like before

  he went with the Dorsey band.

  When we were in high school, he was

  like everybody else. When I went

  to have his father cut my hair

  I could always hear Dodo in the other

  room practicing Chopin.”

  Yes, of course, the doctor says.

  “You don’t understand. He was famous.

  He was important. Parker and Gillespie

  would still go over to the house

 

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