Authors: Jack Gilbert
I hear the trees with surprise after California,
having forgotten the sound that filled my childhood.
I hear the maples and vast elms again. American oak,
English oak, pin oak. Honey locust and mountain ash.
Catalpa, beech, and sycamore. I hear the luxury again
just before autumn. And remember the old riddle:
Winter will take it all, the trees will go on.
This grass will die and this lawn continue. What then
goes on of the child I was? Of that boy taunted
by the lush whispering every summer night in Pittsburgh?
All those I have been are the generalization that tastes
this plum. Brothers who knew all the women I loved.
But did we share or alternate? Was I with Gianna
among the olive trees those evenings in Perugia?
Am I the one who heard with Linda the old Danish men
singing up out of the snow and dark far down below us?
Marrying is like somebody
throwing the baby up.
It happy and them throwing it
higher. To the ceiling.
Which jars the loose bulb
and it goes out
as the baby starts down.
Our slow crop is used up within an hour. So I live
effortlessly by the ocean, where the sun bestows
and bestows and I return nothing. Go cross-grain through
the fire and call my style lust. But the night forces me.
I get so quiet lying under the stars I can’t regulate
the sound of owls altering me. In that dark in front
of the house, I often think of an old man at Sadler’s Wells.
The only one left who had seen the famous dances.
When they did them again, despite the bad notation,
he would watch patiently, saying, No, no, that’s not the way
it was somehow. Until they got it right. But he died.
We think there is a sweetness concealed in the rain,
a presence in the ebullient wet thicket.
And we are wrong.
Summer, the rain, oh Lord, the rain
hammers us into a joy,
which we call divinity.
And we are mistaken.
The heart’s weather of nipple and music
condenses only on the soft metal of personal knowledge.
Our presence is the savor.
We must get to the iron valve in the center
of that meaningless leafage.
Going past even the statuary and the unnaturalness
our faith is founded on.
To close it down.
To reduce that earthquake of flux.
Reducing it to human use.
Apollo walks the deep roads back in the hills
through sleet to the warm place she is.
Eats her fine cunt and afterward they pretend
to watch the late movie to cover their happiness.
He swims with his body in the empty Tyrrhenian Sea.
Comes out of that summer purple with his mind.
Cherishes and makes all year in the city.
But Apollo is not reasonable about desire.
This wolf god, rust god, lord of the countryside.
God of dance and lover of mortal women. Homer said he
is fierce. His coming like the swift coming of night.
That the gods feel fear and awe in the presence
of this lawgiver, explainer of the rules of death.
Averter of evil and praiser of the best.
The violent indifference of Dionysus makes nothing
live. Awful Apollo stands in the brilliant fields,
watching the wind change the olive trees.
He comes back through the dark singing
so quietly that you can hear nothing.
The classical engine of death moves my day. Hurrying me.
Harrowing. Tempering everything piece by piece
in a mighty love of perfection, and leaving each part
broken in turn. I walk through the energy of this slum,
walking there by the Loire among the châteaux of my country.
“Banquets where beautiful and virtuous ladies walked
half-naked, with their hair loose like brides.” Or François
Premier blossoming in that first spring of France.
Flickering.
As Diane de Poitiers flickers. As the ladies of Watteau flicker.
As these fine houses blur to tenements. Beyond, in the park,
the great eucalyptus are clearly provisional, waning in time.
And there are gods in the palace of leaves, their faint glaze
showing briefly as they promenade in the high air, going away.
François Premier dimming. The trees shuddering. The gods,
the Loire, flickering at night. My country, which does not exist,
failing. I walk here singing there by the river with all times
and places flickering and singing about me in their dialects
as I go back into the slum dreaming of Helen washing her breasts
in the Turkish morning.
But she wavers and cracks. Suddenly
the towers go down everywhere. Everything is breaking.
Everything is lost in the fire and lost in the gauging. Fire
burning inside of fire, where love celebrates but cannot preserve.
The marble heart of the world fractures. The unrelenting engine
tests everything with a steel exigence, and returns it maimed.
And yet all we have is somehow born in that murdering.
Born in the fire and born in the breaking. Something is perfected.
François Premier changes as he watches the dying Leonardo drag
through the splendid corridors. Pressure of that terrible intolerance
gets brandy in the welter. Such honey of that heavy rider.
The Chinese, to whom the eighteenth-century English
sent for their elaborate sets of dishes,
followed the accompanying designs faithfully:
writing red in the spaces where it said red,
yellow where it said yellow.
It was a fine Leghorn egg,
and inside, unexpectedly, was the city
of Byzantium. Even from that height
he could see the flash of bedding
at the windows, the lump of Hagia Sophia,
and blue flags on the enormous city walls.
Clearly it was midsummer. Right,
he thought, remembering about love.
Not wanting the responsibility.
Watching the flies begin at it.
I worked my way up the terraced gardens behind the house
and around to the side. Until I could see into the library.
They were all there except Walter. It would have to do.
I regretted the rain. It made me emotional.
Anna had put a coat around her instead of dressing again.
The men were gathered around the children.
She was over by their mother looking at his Corot.
I set up the detonator. There was still six minutes.
It might be too long. Already memories were leaking in.
How poor I was that year in Deauville. And how young.
I thought of the Hôtel du Nord, and of the bar down the block
where I used to meet her. (The rain and the smell of night
pulled at me. Confused me.) Everything means a choice,
she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still
held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit
to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.
The fellow came back to rape her again last night,
but this time her former husband was there.
Why did you rape her, you son of a bitch? he said.
I didn’t, he answered, she let me.
Sure, because you hit her, that’s why she let you.
And it dwindled away into definitions.
Most nights he would be upstairs with the wife
while his friend in the living room played
the same aria again and again, the pain
flowing over their wet, happy bodies.
The orchard changed. His appetite drifted.
In the bedrooms, on the ships, under bushes.
He was distracted by the miscellany
of their dressing tables, or the blonde’s
small scar just as she began to yield.
The contessa caught him looking past the nipples
to her unusual toes. He hurried on,
but she stayed uneasy. As he was.
Still loving it, but thinking of the Lipizzaners:
wondering what those horses were like before
they became a beautiful performance.
He realized that night how much he was in their power.
Ludwig was insolent from the time he arrived
and insisted the projection should be on a plum.
The purple made a poor screen, and at that distance
it was impossible to get any sort of real focus.
He could see the phosphorescence of her body
in the stamp of light, but not her expression
as she turned from kissing the Japanese. The man and bed
drifted smaller and smaller as she came forward.
He could feel his heart as he strained to see.
She showed herself, as usual, naked except for
the black stockings he sent last time. She continued
toward the camera until the screen was an even white.
He sat there in the kitchen thinking it had gone on
so long now these people were the only family he had.
When I looked at the stubborn dark Buddha
high in the forest, I noticed crimson
just along where his lips closed.
And understood Byzantium was burning.
So there would be no more injustice.
Unless everyone can sit on a throne
that rises and has enameled birds that sing,
no one should sit on such a throne.
Such a city measures the merit of villagers.
So it was all perishing in there at last.
The definitions of space by basilicas.
The shape of law in the mind of Justinian.
But how could he dare, this opulent Buddha
with his temples and everyone adoring,
preach to me of the ordinary? Who was he
to subtract Byzantium from the size of my people?
So I begin to sing. Build and sing.
Sing and build inside my thin lips.
They will put my body into the ground.
Chemistry will have its way for a time,
and then large beetles will come.
After that, the small beetles. Then
the disassembling. After that, the Puccini
will dwindle the way light goes
from the sea. Even Pittsburgh will
vanish, leaving a greed tough as winter.
The couple on the San Francisco bus looked Russian,
and spoke what sounded like it. He was already an old man
at fifty. She could have been his wife or daughter.
At first I thought she was retarded. She was probably drunk
and maybe stupid. He had on a gray suit and was always angry.
Whatever she did made him glare and tug at her sleeve.
She fought back dutifully, but without conviction.
Knowing her role was to be wrong. She was wrong. She had
the whole bus watching. It was hard to quarrel properly,
also because everything pleased her so much.
She craned to read the advertisements
or twisted around to see out the other window
or stared with her mouth open at the people who got on.
When there was a seat they could sit in together,
she messed it up. He went to the rear.
She kept whispering, and signaling who would get off next.
He sat proud and closed on a seat that ran the wrong way,
getting thrown about. She wore a cheap babushka
and a foolish old coat and white socks.
Even stopping for red lights pleased her.
Finally a place was empty and she plunged into it,
crying to him and making great scooping gestures.
He pretended not to hear. But she just got louder in her delight,
until she was standing, guarding the seat, and calling
the length of the bus. He had no choice.
She settled in as happy as anyone I ever saw,
pointing out the ads for him all over again.
El Serape’s floor show finished at one. The lights
went off and strong girls came like tin moths.
To dance carefully with us for eight cents.
Now at last the old tenor has begun the deadly
three o’clock show with its granite Mexican music.
The girls are asleep in the side booths.
Where is it? Where in the name of Christ is it?
I thought it said on the girl’s red purse
A kind of sad dance
and all day
wondered what was being defined.
Wisdom? The history of Poland?
All the ways of growing old?
No, I decided (walking back
to the hotel this morning), it must be love.
The real love that follows
early delight and ignorance.
A wonderful sad dance that comes after.
About once a month the beautiful girl
who was my wife or one of our friends
comes to say how they defended me
when the others said I was growing old.
Rotting herds everywhere on the outskirts.
And the old man shuffling among the carrion
with his dim flashlight. Not trusting his memory.
Practicing over and over so that when the time comes
he will automatically say no. Salvaging at least that.