Collected Poems (25 page)
Authors: Jack Gilbert
Having swum in the jungle pool
He gets dead sage and stalks of weeds mostly
He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
He is watching the music with his eyes closed
He keeps the valley like this with his heart
He lives in the barrens, in dying neighborhoods
He manages like somebody carrying a box
He realized that night how much he was in their power
He stands freezing in the dark courtyard looking up
He stands there baffled by pleasure and how little
He struggles to get the marble terrace clear
He thinks about how important the sinning was
He thought of the boy in the middle
He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods
He wonders why he can’t remember the blossoming
Him, she said, and him. They put us in the second car
His spirit dances the long ago, and later
Hitting each other. Backing up
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean
How could he later on believe it was the best
How could they think women a recreation?
I begin to see them again as the twilight darkens
I called Sue the week I moved back from Rome
I called the tree a butternut (which I don’t think
I call it exile, or being relegated
I came back from the funeral and crawled
I found another baby scorpion today. Tiny
I had not seen her for twenty years when she called
I heard a noise this morning and found two old men
I hear the trees with surprise after California
I imagine the gods saying, We will
I lie in bed listening to it sing
I light the lamp and look at my watch
I live with the sound my body is
I’ll try to explain about the fear
Imagine if suffering were real
In April, holding my house and held
I never thought Michiko would come back
In Perugino we have sometimes seen our country
In the end, Hannibal walked out of his city
In the morning when Eve and Adam
In the old days we could see nakedness only
In the small towns along the river
In your thin body is an East of wonder
I remember how I’d lie on my roof
I remember that house I’d rented with them
I say moon is horses in the tempered dark
I see them in black and white as they wait
Is she more apparent because she is not
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
It astonished him when he got to Kathmandu to hear
I thought it said on the girl’s red purse
I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
It is burden enough that death lies on all sides
It is clear why the angels come no more
It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve
It is foolish for Rubens to show her
It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
It should have been the family that lasted
It started when he was a young man
It thrashes in the oaks and soughs in the elms
It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees
It was half a palace, half an ancient fort
It was hard to see the moonlight
It was in the transept of the church, winter in
It was not difficult to persuade the captain
It would be easy if the spirit
I waited until the sun was going down
I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
I was lying on the deck with my eyes closed
I was walking through the harvested fields
I went to sleep by the highway
I woke up every morning on the fourth floor
I worked my way up the terraced gardens behind the house
Let’s get hold of one of those deer
Light is too bare, too simple for her. She has lived
Love is like a garden in the heart, he said
Lying in front of the house all
Maybe when something stops, something lost in us
Mogins disliked everything about Anna’s pregnancy
Monolithos was four fisherman huts along the water
More and more it is the incidental that makes
Most nights he would be upstairs with the wife
Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers
My brother’s girlfriend was not prepared for how much blood
Night after night after hot night in the clearing
Night rises up from the fields
Not for rhyme or reason, but for the heart’s
Nothing here. Rock and fried earth
Not the river as fact, but the winter river
Not wanting to lose it all for poetry
Now come the bright prophets across my life
Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels
Once upon a time I was sitting outside the café
On Fish Mountain, she has turned away
Only you and I still stand in the snow on Highland Avenue
On the beach below Sperlonga everyone else is
Orpheus is too old for it now. His famous voice is gone
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods
Our lives are hard to know. The gardens are provisional
Our slow crop is used up within an hour. So I live
Out of money, so I’m sitting in the shade
People complain about too many moons in my poetry
Perhaps if we could begin some definite way
“Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed
Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough
Pride, pride, pride, pride, pride
Robinson Crusoe breaks a plate on his way out
Rotting herds everywhere on the outskirts
She came into his life like arriving halfway
She is never dead when he meets her
She lives, the bird says, and means nothing
She takes off her clothes without excitement
She told about when the American soldiers
Sixteen years old, surrounded by beasts in the pens
So I come on this birthday at last
Someone had left a door unlocked in the Stockton
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
That is what the Odyssey means
The air full of pictures no matter where you reach in
The air this morning is pleasant and praises nothing
The Americans tried and tried to see
The bird on the other side of the valley
The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies
The blue river is gray at morning
The boat of his heart is tethered to the ancient
The boy came home from school and found a hundred lamps
The brain is dead and the body is
The bright green of the flat fields stretching away
The Chinese, to whom the eighteenth-century English
The classical engine of death moves my day. Hurrying me
The couple on the San Francisco bus looked Russian
The door was in the whitewashed eight-foot walls
The fellow came back to rape her again last night
The fish are dreadful. They are brought up
The four perfectly tangerines were a
The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night
The French woman says, Stop, you’re breaking my dress
The funeral service was people getting up
The girl shepherd on the farm beyond has been
The goldfish is dead this morning on the bottom
The great foreign trees and turtles burn
The great light within the blackness shines out
The Greek gods don’t come in winter
The intricate vast process has produced
Their daughter makes a noise like a giant fly
The last year of my being young the way young people
The Lord gives everything and charges
The Lord sits with me out in front watching
The man certainly looked guilty
The man wondered if he had become
The massive overhead crane comes
The monks petition to live the harder way
The night comes every day to my window
The old women in black at early Mass in winter
The orchard changed. His appetite drifted
The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
The provisional and awkward harp
There is always the harrowing by mortality
There is an easy beauty in the bronze statues
There is a time after what comes after
There is a vividness to eleven years of love
There is a wren sitting in the branches
There is nothing here at the top of the valley
There is someone. Always the same
There was a great tenderness to the sadness
There was a small butcher shop in the North End
There was no water at my grandfather’s
There were a hundred wild people in Allen’s
The room was like getting married
The sea lies in its bed wet and naked
The shadows behind people walking
The ship goes down and everybody is lost, or is living
The silence around the old villa
The silence is so complete he can hear
The snow falling around the man in the naked woods
The soft wind comes sweet in the night
The spirit opens as life closes down
The sultry first night of July, he on the bed
The sun is perfect, but it makes no nightingales sing
The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed
The water nymphs who came to Poseidon
The wild up here is not creatures, wooded
The woman is asleep in the bedroom. The fan is making
The woman is not just a pleasure
The world is announced by the smell of oregano and sage
The world is beyond us even as we own it
They dragged me down. Down the muddy hill
They have killed the rooster, thank God
They have Mary’s wedding ring in the Cathedral
They piled the bound angels with the barley
They were cutting the spring barley by fistfuls
They will put my body into the ground
Things that are themselves. Waves water, the rocks
Think what it was like, he said. Peggy Lee and Goodman
This monster inhabits no classical world
This morning I found a baby scorpion
Thrushes flying under the lake. Nightingales singing underground
To tell the truth, Storyville was brutal. The parlors
Trying to scrape the burned soup from my only pan
Two days ago they were playing the piano
Two girls barefoot walking in the rain
Used, misled, cheated. Our time always shortening
Walked around Bologna at three in the morning
Walking home across the plain in the dark
Walking in the dark streets of Seoul
Watching my wife out in the full moon
Watching the ant walk underwater along
We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
We are given the trees so we can know
We are not one with this world. We are not
We are resident inside with the machinery
We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe
We come from a deep forest of years
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
We had walked three miles through the night
We have already lived in the real paradise
We have seen the population of Heaven
