Authors: Jack Gilbert
What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,
but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day
on these immense, perishing fields? What then?
(Desire is not the problem. This far south,
we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)
He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.
In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.
Year by year he works himself,
replacing youth with stone.
But the marble rings with love
even more than the fine flesh.
What is the best we leave behind?
Certainly love and form and ourselves.
Surely those. But it is the mornings
that are hard to relinquish, and music
and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty
piazzas in small towns flooded with sun.
What we are busy with doesn’t make us
groan
ah! ah!
as we will for the nights
and the cucumbers.
All this windless day snow fell
into the King’s Garden
where I walked, perfecting and growing old,
abandoning one by one everybody:
randomly in love with the paradise
furnace of my mind. Now I sit in the dark,
dreaming of a marble sun
and its strictness. This
is to tell you I am not coming back.
To tell you instead of my private life
among people who must wrestle their hearts
in order to feel anything, as though it were
unnatural. What I master by day
still lapses in the night. But I go on
with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow
come down, learning to flower by tightening.
I called Sue the week I moved back from Rome.
She was getting married on Sunday she said,
but would drive over after lunch to say goodbye.
Later, in the tall grass between some homes,
we were searching around in the torn dirt,
frantic and laughing. Trying to find
the huge diamond engagement ring.
Our bodies flaring in the winter moonlight.
When the storm hit, I was fording the river
and thinking of Doctor Johnson. Garrick, as a boy,
spied on that bulbous man doting on his blowsy wife.
For years did the famous imitation for London society
of those walruses pretending to be lovers. I was
thinking of Johnson’s permanent sadness after she died.
I looked up at the palms floundering in the warm rain
and out at the waves piling up in the cove.
I thought of the foolish earth and how we dally
in my bed. The absurd exaggeration of her.
She lies with me after singing, singing, singing,
singing—Oh, it is such a marriage, however it looks
through any keyhole. I went on, carrying the fish,
feeling for the bottom, and dreaming of us entering
the great hall at Versailles: everyone gaping
and elaborate Louis Quatorze wondering at his envy.
The pigeon with a broken wing.
The pigeon with no left foot.
That pigeon with his beak grown wrong
starving among the others eating.
Or the homeless old women carrying
all they own in worn shopping bags
around Chicago at three in the morning.
What is the point of my suffering?
They are nothing to me. Filthy
pigeons. Jew-hating old women.
Why does it bother with me?
Imagine if suffering were real.
Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.
What if the midget or the girl with one arm
really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.
It was hard to see the moonlight
on the gravestones
because of the neon
in the parking lot.
I said I did in my letters.
But thinking back on it now,
I don’t feel sure.
Not wanting to lose it all for poetry.
Wanting to live the living. All this year
looking on the graveyard below my apartment.
Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.
Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness
wise people speak of, or the modulation
that is the acquiescence to death beginning.
We had walked three miles through the night
when I had to piss. She stopped just beyond.
I aimed at the stone wall of a vineyard,
but the wind took it and she made a sound.
I apologized. “It’s all right,” she said out
of the dark, her voice different. “I liked it.”
Robinson Crusoe breaks a plate on his way out,
and hesitates over the pieces. The ship begins
to sink as he sweeps them up. Sets the table
and stands looking at history for the last time.
Knowing precision will leak from him
however well he learns the weather or vegetation,
and despite the cunning of his hands.
His mind can survive only among the furniture.
Amid the primary colors of the island, he will
become a fine thing, perhaps, but a different one.
I went to sleep by the highway
and woke just before dawn,
to see people drifting toward me
across the fields. Silently
getting into trucks.
Blurred like first love.
Another inappropriate beauty
I leave out of what I am making.
Every generation tells
of how the good world died.
How he went into the giant corn
at night, leaving the dogs.
Always they say it was the end
once and for all of America.
Grandfather and curing tobacco.
We picked the clumsy leaves,
sweating. And piled them on sleds.
Girls tied them in bunches
and the bunches on poles. The poles
were hung in a log barn.
He built fires underneath for days
and stayed up with the thermometer.
I was proud to be out there, but afraid
of his dogs and the size of the dark.
A city child, down for the summer.
When suddenly he walked into
the twelve-foot wall of corn.
Leaving the dogs. Firelight
on the barn. The smell of Carolina.
The stars making me lurch.
Thirty years ago. And now
loud cantons night
after night: America, America.
He came back with watermelons,
but always I see him going
into the corn. And that order ending.
Helot for what time there is
in the baptist hegemony of death.
For what time there is summer,
island, cornice. Weeping
and singing of what declines
into the earth. But of having,
not of not having. What abounds.
Amazed morning after morning
by the yielding. What times there are.
My fine house that love is.
I
Fire begins seriously at the body
and it sits up. The oldest son beats it down.
It sits up and he clubs it back again.
That’s what I want.
This best time begins and stomach can’t have it.
Nor pride. Nor snakebrain’s excitements
and darkness. Let him hammer me down
into the paradise furnace.
The boy I was remembers the scale. Flames
two hundred feet up into the sky every night.
Three powerful rivers naked everywhere.
Brick and metal. Dirty brick and old raw iron.
He does not understand, but he knew the wanting.
Remembers working in the mill, the titanic shear
cleaving slabs into sections. Halfway
to something. Smell of Pittsburgh after rain.
Smell of winter steel and grease, and the smell
of welding. Believing there were breasts.
So he will hammer me deep into that rendering.
Knowing blindly there is something to get.
II
Love like chunks of an animal.
Clothes ripped off and clothes drawn aside.
Bodies like cries from the ocean.
Hearts like unkeeled Jerusalem.
Italian breasts under brambles in Perugia.
My youth clandestinely in the palazzo.
Stumbling into love,
bewildered by the storms of me. Soft beauty.
Beyond youth after, and my heart augmenting.
(Stronger, she said to the choir, not louder.)
Love a second time, then eight years with Linda.
Now love probably not again.
The pictures of paradise seem innocent,
and the Devil’s temptation things for children.
I would burrow into stone. Into iron.
Into the rain to find someone important
there in the dark. A mystery that magnifies
the earth but does not lie. What is Pure Land
to that? Let him force me to try once more.
Insist, insist until I at least fail.
III
Cicadas on the olive trees rage in brevity.
When I go out at night, the stars and quiet
smell of jasmine and I long for a life
like fatty boiled beef. Pound me into that.
I was looking down on my Tokyo graveyard
late at night and heard in the complete
silence a violin string snap.
Drive me down there.
Lord Nobunaga (surrounded, the castle
on fire), knowing he would die that day,
put on his kimono and slowly danced the No¯
in the flames. When great Hideyoshi was sho¯gun
and lying on his deathbed, he wept constantly.
Saying over and over, I don’t want to die.
I want to live a thousand years.
Keep me at them both.
The boy walked the mean winter streets of Pittsburgh
knowing of their leafy summer. Let him make sure
the dreams are loose before the fire gets it all.
And I am hammered into the sun.
The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful
and alien and cold from night under the sea,
the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.
Soft machinery of the dark,
the man thinks,
washing them. “What can you know of my machinery!”
demands the Lord.
Sure,
the man says quietly
and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,
getting to the muck of something terrible.
The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses
to live this way. I build cities where things
are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live
with rock and silence.” The man washes away
the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.
Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts
in peppers. “You have lived all year without women.”
He takes out everything and puts in the fish.
“No one knows where you are. People forget you.
You are vain and stubborn.” The man slices
tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish
and scrambles eggs.
I am not stubborn,
he thinks,
laying all of it on the table in the courtyard
full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying
on the food.
Not stubborn, just greedy.
The man certainly looked guilty.
Ugly, ragged, and not clean. Not to mention
their finding him there in the woods
with her body. Neighbors told how he was
always playing with dead squirrels,
mangled dogs, even snakes. He said
those were the only things that would
allow him to get close. “Look at me,”
the old man said with uncomplaining
simplicity, “I’m already one of the dead
among the dead. It’s hard to watch things
humiliated the way death does it.
Possums smeared on the road, birds with ants
eating out their eyes. Even dying rats
want privacy for their disgrace.
It’s true I washed the dirt from her face
and the blood off the body. Combed her hair.
I slept beside her, at her feet for two days,
the way my dog used to. I got the dress
on the best I could. She looked so neglected.
Like garbage thrown in the weeds.
Like nobody cared because he had done that
to her. I kept thinking about how long
she is going to be alone now. I knew
the police would take pictures and put them
in the papers naked and open so people
eating breakfast could look at her. I wanted
to give her spirit enough time to get ready.”
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite.
Love,
we say,
God,
we say,
Rome
and
Michiko,
we write, and the words
get it wrong. We say
bread
and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.