Authors: Jack Gilbert
What do they say each new morning
in Heaven? They would
weary of one always
singing how green the
green trees are in
Paradise.
Surely it would seem convention
and affectation
to rejoice every time
Helen went by, since
she would have gone
daily by.
What can I say then each time
your whiteness glimmers
and fashions in the night?
If each time your voice
opens so near
in that dark
new? What can I say each morning
after that you will
believe? But there is this
stubborn provincial
singing in me,
O, each time.
Let’s get hold of one of those deer
that live way up there in the mountains.
Lure it down with flutes, or lasso
it from helicopters, or just take it out
with a .30-30. Anyhow, we get one.
Then we reach up inside its ass and maybe
find us a little gland or something
that might make a hell of a perfume.
It’s worth a try. You never know.
Not the river as fact, but the winter river,
and that river in June as two rivers.
We feel it run through our nature, the water
smelling of wet rotting just before spring,
and we call it love, a wilderness in the mind.
Mediterranean light as provender of women.
All of it contingent. This version of me
differs from another version as a vector product.
The body is a condition of the spirit.
The snow sifts down from the pines in the noon
and makes the silence even louder. A tumult
of singing when we cross the border of courtesy
into a savor of the heart. Each of us tempered
by the other, altered in ways more truly us.
We go into the secret with the shades pulled
down at dawn. Like a house on fire in sunlight.
We enable God to finally understand there is
a difference between you sitting in the clearing
confused by moonlight and you sitting in the bare
farmhouse amid the kerosene light. The two of you.
The boy came home from school and found a hundred lamps
filling the house. Lamps everywhere and all turned on
despite the summer shining in the handsome windows.
Two and three lamps on every table. Lamps in chairs
and on the rugs and even in the kitchen. More lamps
upstairs and on the topmost floor as well. All brightly
burning, until the police came and took them away.
An excess of light that continued in him for a long time.
That radiance of lamps flourishing in the day became
a benchmark for his heart, became a Beaufort scale
for his appetites. The wildness and gladness of it,
the illicitness in him magnified the careful gleam
of Paris mornings when he got to them, and the dark
glisten of the Seine each night as he crossed
the stone bridges back to his room. It was the same
years later as the snow fell through the bruised light
of a winter afternoon and he stood in a narrow street
telling Anna he was leaving. All of it a light beyond
anybody’s ability to manage. The Massachusetts sunlight
lies comfortably on the maples. The Pittsburgh lamps
inside of him make it look maybe not good enough.
For Linda Gregg
From this distance they are unimportant
standing by the sea. She is weeping, wearing
a white dress, and the marriage is almost over,
after eight years. All around is the flat
uninhabited side of the island. The water
is blue in the morning air. They did not know
this would happen when they came, just the two
of them and the silence. A purity that looked
like beauty and was too difficult for people.
On Fish Mountain, she has turned away
from the temple where they painted
pictures of Paradise everywhere inside
so that a population who prayed only
not to live could imagine yearning.
She is looking at a tree instead.
Below is a place where the man
and the beautiful woman will eat
cold noodles almost outside on a hot day.
Below that is the sound of fast water
with a barefoot woman beside it beating
an octopus on the wet stones. And then
the floor of the valley opening out onto
the yellow of blooming mustard and smoke
going straight up from large farmhouses
in the silent early evening. Where they
will walk through all of it slowly,
not talking much. A small him
and a smaller her with long black hair,
so happy together, beginning the trip
toward where she will die and leave him
looking at the back of her turned away
looking at a small tree.
“Barefoot farm girls in silk dresses,” he thinks.
Meaning Marie Antoinette and the nobles
at Versailles playing at the real world.
Thinking about the elaborate seduction of ladies
and their languorous indifference in complying.
“Labored excess,” he mutters, remembering
the modern Japanese calligraphers straining
at deliberate carelessness. He is still
waiting for his strange heart to moderate.
“Love as two spirits merging,” he thinks,
“the flesh growing luminous and then transparent.
Who could deal with that? Like a summer lake
flickering through pine trees.” It says
in Ecclesiastes that everything has its season.
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.
He used to wonder about the proper occasion
for casting away stones, whether it might
mean desire. He wonders if Pimpaporn went back
to her village, pictures the jungle and houses
made of teak on stilts. Tries to understand that
as a real world. Tries to know her belatedly.
He thinks of the multitude of giant rats he killed
in those cavernous, Sunday-empty, neon-dark
steel mills. Remembers piling them up
on winter nights, the weight of each, one after
the other. White mist on the black river outside.
On the beach below Sperlonga everyone else is
speaking Italian, lazily paradisal in the heat.
He tries to make something of it, as though
something were going on. As though there were
something to be found in the obvious nakedness
of breasts. He complicates what is easily true,
hunting it down. It matters disproportionately
to him to see the ocean suddenly as he turns over.
He watches the afternoon as though it had
a secret. For years he will be considering
the two women nearby who decide to get lunch
at the restaurant back by the cliff. The taller
one picks up her top and tries to get
into it as they start out. But it tangles,
and she gives it indolently to the prettier one,
who puts it on as they walk away carelessly
into the garnishing Mediterranean light.
He lives in the barrens, in dying neighborhoods
and negligible countries. None with an address.
But still the Devil finds him. Kills the wife
or spoils the marriage. Publishes each place
and makes it popular, makes it better, makes it
unusable. Brings news of friends, all defeated,
most sick or sad without reasons. Shows him
photographs of the beautiful women in old movies
whose luminous faces sixteen feet tall looked out
at the boy in the dark where he grew his heart.
Brings pictures of what they look like now.
Says how lively they are, and brave despite their age.
Taking away everything. For the Devil is commissioned
to harm, to keelhaul us with loss, with knowledge
of how all things splendid are disfigured by small
and small. Yet he allows us to eat roast goat
on the mountain above Parakia. Lets us stumble
for the first time, unprepared, onto the buildings
of Palladio in moonlight. Maybe because he is not
good at his job. I believe he loves us against
his will. Because of the women and how the men
struggle to hear inside them. Because we construe
something important from trees and locomotives,
smell weeds on a hot July afternoon and are augmented.
He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
inside him. He labors up through the pines
with firewood and goes back down again.
Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries
finished, and the iris gone before that.
The peas dead in the garden and the beans
almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.
The thing is inside him like that, and will
come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.
Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often
in the dark and ends up throwing stones.
The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,
cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.
They stand glaring in the faint starlight.
The snow falling around the man in the naked woods
is like the ash of heaven, ash from the cool fire
of God’s mother-of-pearl, moon-stately heart.
Sympathetic but not merciful. His strictness
parses us. The discomfort of living this way
without birds, among maples without leaves, makes
death and the world visible. Not the harshness,
but the way this world can be known by pushing
against it. And feeling something pushing back.
The whiteness of the winter married to this river
makes the water look black. The water actually
is the color of giant mirrors set along the marble
corridors of the spirit, the mirrors empty
of everything. The man is doing the year’s accounts.
Finding the balance, trying to estimate how much
he has been translated. For it does translate him,
well or poorly. As the woods are translated
by the seasons. He is searching for a baseline
of the Lord. He searches like the blind man
going forward with a hand stretched out in front.
As the truck driver ice-fishing on the big pond
tries to learn from his line what is down there.
The man attends to any signal that might announce
Jesus. He hopes for even the faintest evidence,
the presence of the Lord’s least abundance. He measures
with tenderness, afraid to find a heart more classical
than ripe. Hoping for honey, for love’s alembic.
Is she more apparent because she is not
anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko
said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake
with the sound of their petals falling.”
What is the man searching for inside her blouse?
He has been with her body for seven years
and still is surprised by the arches of her
slender feet. He still traces her spine
with careful attention, feeling for the bones
of her pelvic girdle when he arrives there.
Her flesh is bright in sunlight and then not
as he leans forward and back. Picasso in his later
prints shows himself as a grotesque painter
watching closely a young Spanish woman on the bed
with her legs open and the old duenna in black
to the side. He had known nakedness every day
for sixty years. What could there be in it still
to find? But he was happy even then to get
close to the distant, distant intermittency.
Like a piano playing faintly on a second floor
in a back room. The music seems familiar, but is not.
Mogins disliked everything about Anna’s pregnancy.
Said it was organs and fluids and stuff no man wanted
to know about. He was so disturbed by her milkiness
after the birth that he took his class to another part
of Denmark for the summer. When we finally made love,
the baby began to cry, and I went to get him. Anna held
the boy as we continued, until the strength went out
of her and I cradled his nakedness asleep against me
as we passed through the final stages. In the happiness
afterward, both of us nursed at her, our heads
nudging each other blindly in the brilliant dark.
The Lord sits with me out in front watching
a sweet darkness begin in the fields.
We try to decide whether I am lonely.
I tell about waking at four a.m. and thinking
of what the man did to the daughter of Louise.
And there being no moon when I went outside.
He says maybe I am getting old.
That being poor is taking too much out of me.
I say I am fine. He asks for the Brahms.
We watch the sea fade. The tape finishes again
and we sit on. Unable to find words.
I wake up like a stray dog
belonging to no one.
Cold, cold, and the rain.
Friendships outgrown or ruined.
And love, dear God, the women
I have loved now only names
remembered: dead, lost, or old.
Mildness more and more the danger.
Living among rocks and weeds
to guard against wisdom.
Alone with the heart howling
and refusing to let it feed on
mere affection. Lying in the dark,
singing about the intractable
kinds of happiness.