Authors: Jack Gilbert
For Isaiah Berlin
When the hedgehogs here at night
see a car and its fierce lights
coming at them, they do the one
big thing they know.
The intricate vast process has produced
a singularity which lies in darkness
hearing the small owls, a donkey snorting
in the barley field, and frogs down near
the cove. What he is listening to is
the muteness of the dog at each farm
in the valley. Their silence means no
lover is abroad nor any vagrant looking
for where to sleep. But there is a young
man, very still, under the heavy grapes
in another part of Heaven. There are still
women hoping behind the dark windows
of farmhouses. Like he can hear himself not
hearing Verdi. What else don’t the dogs know?
When the angels found him sitting in the half light
of his kerosene lamp eating lentils, his eyes widened.
But all he said was could he leave a note. The one
wearing black looked at the one in red who shrugged,
so he began writing, desperately. Wadded the message
into an envelope and wrote
Anna
on the front. Quickly
began another, shoulders hunched, afraid of them.
Finished and wrote
Pimpaporn
on it. Began a third
one and the heavy angel growled. “I have Schubert,”
the man offered, turning on the tape. The one in black
said quietly that at least he didn’t say “So soon!”
When the ink ran out, the man whimpered and struggled
to the table piled with books and drafts. He finished
again and scrawled
Suzanne
across it. The one in red
growled again and the man said he would put on his shoes.
When they took him out into the smell of dry vetch
and the ocean, he began to hold back, pleading:
“I didn’t put the addresses! I don’t want them to think
I forgot.” “It doesn’t matter,” the better angel said,
“they have been dead for years.”
Think what it was like, he said. Peggy Lee and Goodman
all the time. Carl Ravazza making me crazy
with “Vieni Su” from a ballroom in New Jersey
every night, the radio filling my dark room
in Pittsburgh with naked-shouldered women
in black gowns. Helen Forrest and Helen O’Connell,
and later the young Sarah Vaughan out of Chicago
from midnight until two. Think of being fifteen
in the middle of leafy June when Sinatra and Ray
Eberle both had number one records of “Fools Rush In.”
Somebody singing “Tenderly” and somebody doing
“This Love of Mine.” Helplessly adolescent while
the sound of romance was constantly everywhere.
All day long out of windows along the street.
Sinatra with “Close to You.” And all the bands. Artie
Shaw with “Green Eyes” and whoever was always playing
“Begin the Beguine.” Me desperate because I wouldn’t
get there in time. Who can blame me for my heart?
What choice did I have? Harry James with “Sleepy
Lagoon.” Imagine, on a summer night, “Sleepy Lagoon”!
After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
“It’s all right,” he had to keep
saying, “I really won’t mind.”
Until the friend finally gave in.
“She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot.”
We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.
By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,
power without consequence. The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon
and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication. We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed
with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise
because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.
I woke up every morning on the fourth floor,
in the two-hundred-year-old walls made
of plaster and river grass. I would leave
the woman and walk across beautiful København
to the island of Amager. To my small room
in the leftover Nazi barracks that looked out
on a swamp. Most of the time it was winter.
I would light my hydrant-size iron stove
and set a pot on top, putting in hamburger
and vegetables while the water was getting hot.
Starting to type with numb hands. The book
I planned to write in two weeks for a thousand
dollars already a week behind (and threatening
to get beyond a month). Out of money and no
prospects. Then the lovely smell of soup
and the room snug. I would type all day
and late into the night. Until the soup
was finished. Then I would start back across
the frozen city, crunching over the moats,
loud in the silence. The stars brilliant.
Focused on her waiting for me, ready to fry
sausages at two in the morning. Me thinking idly
of the ancient Chinese poet writing in his
poverty, “Ah, is this not happiness.”
Used, misled, cheated. Our time always shortening.
What we cherish always temporary. What we love
is, sooner or later, changed. But for a while we can
visit our other life. Can rejoice in its being there
in its absence. Giving thanks for what we are allowed
to think about it, grateful for it even as it wanes.
For knowing it is there. The way women on rainy days
sometimes go into the bedroom to cry about losing
the first man they loved. The way a man remembers the young
woman at an upstairs window looking out he saw once,
for a moment, as he drove through a sleeping village.
Or the brightness in the memory of the failed hotel
where the waiters in their immaculate white uniforms
were barefoot. The elegant dining room silent except for
the sound of rain falling in the tin buckets. And
the whispering of giant overhead fans with broken
blades as they turned in the heat. There was the scraping
sound in the piles of dead leaves on the lavish veranda.
And occasionally the bright sound of broken glass.
All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then.
Like a giant bell ringing long after you can’t hear it.
After twenty hours in bed with no food, I decided
I should have at least tea. Got up to light the lamp,
but the sweating and shivering started again
and I staggered backwards across the room. Slammed
against the stone wall. Came to with blood on my head
and couldn’t figure out which way the bed was.
Crawled around searching for the matches but gave up,
remembering there was one left in a box by the stove.
It flared and went out. “Exaggerated,” I said
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!
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 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.
The Greek fishermen do not
play on the beach and I don’t
write funny poems.
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.
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.
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.
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.