Authors: Jack Gilbert
The oxen have voices
the flowers are wounds
you never recover from Tuscany noons
they cripple with beauty
and butcher with love
sing folly, sing flee, sing going down
the moon is corroding
the deer have gone lame
(but you never escape the incurably sane
uncrippled by beauty
unbutchered by love)
sing folly, flee, sing going down
now it rains in your bowels
it rains though you weep
with terrible tameness it rains in your sleep
and cripples with beauty
and butchers with love
you never recover
you never escape
and you mustn’t endeavor to find the mistake
that cripples with beauty
that butchers as love
sing folly, sing flee, sing going down
sing maidens and towns, oh maidens and towns
folly, flee, sing going down
For Sue
How could they think women a recreation?
Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest?
Only the ignorant or the busy could. That elm
of flesh must prove a luxury of primes;
be perilous and dear with rain of an alternate earth.
Which is not to damn the forested China of touching.
I am neither priestly nor tired, and the great knowledge
of breasts with their loud nipples congregates in me.
The sudden nakedness, the small ribs, the mouth.
Splendid. Splendid. Splendid. Like Rome. Like loins.
A glamour sufficient to our long marvelous dying.
I say sufficient and speak with earned privilege,
for my life has been eaten in that foliate city.
To ambergris. But not for recreation.
I would not have lost so much for recreation.
Nor for love as the sweet pretend: the children’s game
of deliberate ignorance of each to allow the dreaming.
Not for the impersonal belly nor the heart’s drunkenness
have I come this far, stubborn, disastrous way.
But for relish of those archipelagoes of person.
To hold her in hand, closed as any sparrow,
and call and call forever till she turn from bird
to blowing woods. From woods to jungle. Persimmon.
To light. From light to princess. From princess to woman
in all her fresh particularity of difference.
Then oh, through the underwater time of night,
indecent and still, to speak to her without habit.
This I have done with my life, and am content.
I wish I could tell you how it is in that dark,
standing in the huge singing and the alien world.
Three days I sat
bewildered by love.
Three nights I watched
the gradations of dark.
Of light. Saw
three mornings begin,
and was taken each time
unguarded
of the loud bells.
My heart split open
as a melon.
And will not heal.
Gives itself
senselessly
to the old women
carrying milk.
The clumsy men sweeping.
To roofs.
God protect me.
What pleasure hath it, to see in a mangled carcase?
—The Confessions of Saint Augustine
I am old of this ravening.
Poisoned of their God-damned flesh.
The ugly man-flesh.
And the fat woman-flesh.
I am tired and sick and old of it.
But the precise addiction is unrelenting.
Even now
it rouses sluggishly in me
and soon the imperious iron bells
bells
will begin
and the knowledge of the next one
will enter me
the realization of her walking peacefully
somehow toward our somewhere meeting.
The realization will come
and the need will be on me
and I must begin again.
Seeking along the great river of Fillmore
or the quiet river of Pacific Heights
with its birds.
Or through the cities of Market Street.
Perhaps this time it will be back
at the beginning
in North Beach.
In Vesuvio’s maybe
where they come like deer.
Or The Place where they come like
ugly deer
laughing
and telling me
all intense
how they want to experience
everything.
Till the shouting begins in my head.
Asking me if I believe in Evil.
And the power climbs in me like Kong.
In the morning
it will be like every morning.
The filthy taste in my mouth
of old, clotting blood
the vomiting
and the murderous, stupid labor
with the stupid, open body.
The night comes every day to my window.
The serious night, promising, as always,
age and moderation. And I am frightened
dutifully, as always, until I find
in the bed my three hearts and the cat
in my stomach talking, as always now,
of Gianna. And I am happy through the dark
with my feet singing of how she lies
warm and alone in her dark room
over Umbria where the brief and only
paradise flowers white by white.
I turn all night with the thought of her mouth
a little open, and hunger to walk
quiet in the Italy of her head, strange
but no tourist on the streets of her childhood.
(after Waley)
Meelee’s away in Lima.
No one breeds flowers in my head.
Of course, women do breed flowers in my head
but not like Meelee’s—
So fragile, so pale.
The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
the bravery. Say it’s not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn’t that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore’s heart: the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
not the month’s rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
that is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
I carried my house to Tijuana.
I carried my house through moonlight.
Through dirt streets of cribs
and faces clustered at dark windows.
Past soft voices and foolish calls
I carried my house.
To a bright room
with its nine girls,
the projector whirring,
and steady traffic to the wooden stalls.
Sleepy and sad,
I sat all night with the absurd young
listening to the true jungle in my house
where lions ate roses of blood
and sang of Alcibiades.
It is foolish for Rubens to show her
simpering. They were clearly guilty
and did her much sorrow. But this poem
is not concerned with justice.
It concerns itself with fear.
If it could, it would force you to see
them at the hedge with their feeble eyes,
the bodies, and the stinking mouths.
To see the one with the trembling hands.
The one with the sun visor.
It would show through the leaves
all the loveliness of the world
compacted. The lavish gleaming.
Her texture. The sheen of water on her
brightness. The moon in sunlight.
Not only the choir of flesh.
Nor the intimacy of her inner mouth.
A meadow of warmth inhabited.
Personal. And the elders excluded
forever. Forever in exile.
It would show you their inexact hands
till you acknowledged how it comes on you.
I think of them pushing to the middle
of Hell where the pain is strongest.
To see at the top of the chimney,
far off, the small coin of color.
And, sometimes, leaves.
The four perfectly tangerines were a
clue
as they sat
singing
(three to one)
in that ten-thirty
a.m. room
not unhappily of death
singing of how they were tangerines
against white
but how
against continuous orange
they were only
fruit.
One sang of God
of his eight thousand green faces
and the immediate glory of his
pavilioned
dancing.
Three sang of how you can’t go back.
One sang of the seeds in his heart
of how
inside the tangerine-colored skin
inside his flesh
(which was the color of
tangerines)
were little
seeds
which were
inside
green.
So
I opened the one
and the odor of his breaking
was the sweet breasts
of being no longer
only.
For Doris
The provisional and awkward harp
of me
makes nothing of you now.
I labor to constrain it
but am unschooled and cannot.
One learns to play the harp,
said Aristotle, by playing.
But I do not. Such a harp
grows always more dear
and I manage always less truly
well. Each visitor offhand
does better. While I with this year
of loss can do nothing.
Can say nothing of the smell
of rain in the desert
and the cottonwoods blowing
above us. If it would tell
even so little of Council Bluffs.
But it will not.
I can make it mourn
but not celebrate the River
nor my happiness in having been
of you.
I’ll try to explain about the fear
again
since you think my trouble with the whales
and elephants is a question of size.
I’m on the other inhabited island
of the Tremiti group,
looking across evening on the water
and up the enormous cliffs
to San Nicola.
I’ve been watching the few weak lights
begin,
thinking of Alcibiades
and those last years at Trebizond.
I’ve been looking at San Nicola
huddled behind the great, ruined
fortifications,
and thinking how the dark is leaking
out of the broken windows.
How the doors on those stone houses
are banging and banging and banging.
I’ve been remembering the high grass
in the piazza.
And Rimbaud in the meaningless jungle.
I know the business of the whales
may bring me there.
That trying to understand about the elephants,
about my stunned heart,
may require it.
May choose that for the last years.
A bare white room
overlooking the cathedral.
High up there
with the pure light
and the lust.
Now come the bright prophets across my life.
The solemn flesh, the miracles, and the pain.
Across the simple meadows of my heart,
splendidly you come promising sorrow.
And knowing, I bless your coming with trees of love,
singing, singing even to the night.
The princely mornings will fail when you go, and night
will come like animals. Yet I open my cautious life
and sing thanksgiving of yes, oh yes to love,
even while the tireless crows of pain
and the diligent fever-ticks of sorrow
are somehow privileged in my flowering heart.
For you fashion such rivers in my soon unable heart
as are focused to paradise by the crippling night.
Such terraced waters as are cheap at only sorrow.
And to have cargoes of hyacinths sail once more my life
I will freely undertake any debt of pain.
I will break these hands for tokens, oh my love.
I’d walk her home after work,
buying roses and talking of Bechsteins.
She was full of soul.
Her small room was gorged with heat,
and there were no windows.
She’d take off everything
but her pants,
and take the pins from her hair,
throwing them on the floor
with a great noise.
Like Crete.
We wouldn’t make love.
She’d get on the bed
with those nipples,
and we’d lie
sweating
and talking of my best friend.
They were in love.
When I got quiet,
she’d put on usually Debussy,
and,
leaning down to the small ribs,
bite me.
Hard.