Collected Poems (4 page)
Authors: Jack Gilbert
Pure
every day there’s the bridge
every day there’s the bridge
every day there’s the bridge
every day there’s the bridge
and each night.
It’s not easy to live this way.
Once
the bridge was small and stone-white
and called the Pont au Change
or the Pont Louis-Philippe.
We went home at midnight
to the Île Saint-Louis as deer
through a rustle of bells.
Six years distant
and the Atlantic
and a continent.
The way I was then
and the way I am now.
A long time.
I fed in the bright parts of the forest,
stinting to pass among the impala.
But one can acquire a taste for love
as for loneliness
or ugliness
as for saintliness.
Each a special way of going down.
That was a sweet country
and large.
Ample with esplanades,
easy with apricots.
A happy country.
But a country for children.
Now
every day there’s the bridge.
Every day there’s the exacting,
literal, foreign country of the heart.
Toads and panders
ruined horses
pears
terrifying honey
heralds
heralds
Two girls barefoot walking in the rain
both girls lovely, one of them is sane
hurting me softly
hurting me though
two girls barefoot walking in the snow
walking in the white snow
walking in the black
two girls barefoot never coming back
In April, holding my house and held
unprepared in the stomach of death,
I receive the vacant landscape of America.
In April, before the concealment of beauty,
the vacant landscape of America, bright,
comes through me. Comes through my house like Laura.
Intractable, the states of reality come,
lordly, in April, Texas, impossibly
to this house furnished with the standard half-
consummated loves: Vienna under rain,
summer in the mountains above Como, Provence
the special country of my heart. In April,
inadvertently, at thirty-three, filled
with walled towns of lemon trees, I am
unexpectedly alone in West Virginia.
The Spanish Steps—February 23, 1961
What can I do with these people?
They come to the risk so dutifully.
Are delighted by anecdotes that give
them Poetry. Are grateful to be told
of diagonals that give them Painting.
Good people. But stubborn when warned
the beast is not domestic.
How can I persuade them
that the dark, soulful Keats
was five feet one?
Liked fighting and bear-baiting?
I can’t explain the red hair.
Nor say how you died so full
of lust for Fanny Brawne.
I will tell them of Semele.
“Asti kasmin-cit pradese nagaram”
In your thin body is an East of wonder.
In your walking are accounts of morning.
Your hands are legends, and your mouth a proof of kilins.
But the way is long
and the roads bad.
Beyond the crucial pass of Tauris
past the special lure of vice
beyond Persepolis and the ease of Badakhshan
stretches a waste of caution.
The route is difficult
and the maps wrong.
If one survives the singing-sands of pride
and the always drumming hill of fear
he finds an impregnable range of moderation.
Ascent is dangerous
and the cold maims.
Could one get through, the brilliance of Cambaluc
and the wealth of Shangtu would be there, no doubt;
but what of the Bamboo Pavilion? It is fashioned, they say,
to be easily dismantled and moved.
The Khan is seventy
and the Ming strong.
In your thin body is an East of wander.
In your seeking are distraints of mourning.
While Venice is close at hand—to be taken now or lost.
The season of grace
may be spent once.
In the pavilion, they say, are birds.
It is clear why the angels come no more.
Standing so large in their beautiful Latin,
how could they accept being refracted
so small in another grammar, or leave
their perfect singing for this broken speech?
Why should they stumble this alien world?
Always I have envied the angels their grace.
But I left my hope of Byzantine size
and came to this awkwardness, this stupidity.
Came finally to you washing my face
as everyone laughed, and found a forest
opening as marriage ran in me. All
the leaves in the world turned a little
singing: the angels are wrong.
So I come on this birthday at last
here in the house of strangers.
With a broken pair of shoes,
no profession, and a few poems.
After all that promise.
Not by addiction or play, by choices.
By concern for whales and love,
for elephants and Alcibiades.
But to arrive at so little product.
A few corners done,
an arcade up but unfaced,
and everywhere the ambitious
unfinished monuments to Myshkin
and magnitude. Like persisting
on the arrogant steeple of Beauvais.
I wake in Trastevere
in the house of city-peasants,
and lie in the noise dreaming
on the wealth of summer nights
from my childhood when the dark
was sixty feet deep in luxury,
of elm and maple and sycamore.
I wandered hour by hour
with my gentle, bewildered need,
following the faint sound
of women in the moving leaves.
In Latium, years ago,
I sat by the road watching
an ox come through the day.
Stark-white in the distance.
Occasionally under a tree.
Colorless in the heavy sun.
Suave in the bright shadows.
Starch-white near in the glare.
Petal-white near in the shade.
Linen, stone-white, and milk.
Ox-white before me, and past
into the thunder of light.
For ten years I have tried
to understand about the ox.
About the sound. The whales.
Of love. And arrived here
to give thanks for the profit.
I wake to the wanton freshness.
To the arriving and leaving. To the journey.
I wake to the freshness. And do reverence.
Poems 1962 and 1982
[1982]
Monolithos means single stone, and refers to the small hill behind our house which gave the place we lived its name. It is the tip of a non-igneous stone island buried in debris when most of Thíra blew apart 3,500 years ago.
—J.G.
BETWEEN POEMS
A lady asked me
what poets do
between poems.
Between passions
and visions. I said
that between poems
I provided for death.
She meant as to jobs
and commonly.
Commonly, I provide
against my death,
which comes on.
And give thanks
for the women I have
been privileged to
in extreme.
Circe had no pleasure in pigs.
Pigs, wolves, nor fawning
lions. She sang in our language
and, beautiful, waited for quality.
Every month they came
struggling up from the cove.
The great sea-light behind them.
Each time maybe a world.
Season after season.
Dinner after dinner.
And always at the first measures
of lust became themselves.
Odysseus? A known liar.
A resort darling. Untouchable.
The sky
on and on,
stone.
The Mediterranean
down the cliff,
stone.
These fields,
rock.
Dead weeds
everywhere.
And the weight
of sun.
In the weeds
an old woman
lifting off
snails.
Near
two trees
of ripe figs.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.
Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.
Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.
Degas said he didn’t paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had.
For example, that fragment of entablature
in the Museo delle Terme. It continues
giant forever. Without seasons.
Ambergris of the Latin whale.
For years he dealt with it, month by month
in his white room above Perugia
while thousands of swifts turned
in the structures of sun with a sound like glass.
Strained to accommodate it
in the empty streets of Rome. Singing
according to whether bells preempted the dark
or rain ordered the earth. And even now,
like Kurtz, he crawls toward the lethal merit.
What are we to do about loveliness? We get past
that singing early and reach an honest severity.
We all were part of the Children’s Crusade: trusted,
were sold bad boats, and went under. But we still
dream of the voices. Not to go back. Thinking
to go on even into the confusion of pleasure.
We hear them carol at night and do not mind the lies,
intending to come on those women from inland.
After a summer with happy people,
I rush back, scared, gulping
down pain wherever I can get it.
As slowly as possible, I said,
and we went into paradise.
Rushes alternate with floating islands
of tomatoes. Stretches of lily pads
and then lotus. The kingfishers
flash and go into the lake,
making a sound in the silence.
After, I can hear her breathing.
The Japanese built gardens eight
hundred years ago as a picture
of the Pure Land, because people
could not imagine a happy life.
My friend lives on the Delaware River
and fashions Eden out of burned
buildings that were the Automats
of his youth in New York.
Another designs a country
with justice for everyone.
I know a woman who makes heaven
out of her body. I lie in the smell
of water, with the sun going down,
trying to figure out this painful
model I have carpentered together.
Perhaps if we could begin some definite way.
At a country inn of the old Russian novels,
maybe. A contrived place to establish manner.
With roles of traditional limit for distance.
I might be going back, and there would be a pause.
Late at night, while they changed the horses on your sled.
Or prepared my room. An occasion to begin.
Though not on false terms. I am not looking for love.
I have what I can manage, and too many claims.
Just a formal conversation, with no future.
But I must explain that I will probably cry.
It is important you ignore it. I am fine.
I am not interested in discussing it.
It is complicated and not amiable.
The sort of thing our arrangements provide against.
There should be a fireplace. Brandy, and some cigars.
Or cheese with warm crackers. Anything that permits
the exercise of incidental decorum:
deferring to the other’s preceding, asking
for a light. Vintages. It does not matter what.
The fireplace is to allow a different grace.
And there will be darkness above new snow outside.
Even if we agree on a late afternoon,
there would still be snow. Inside, the dining room must
have a desolate quality. So we can talk
without raising our voices. Finally, I hope
it is understood we are not to meet again.
And that both of us are men, so all that other
is avoided. We can speak and preserve borders.
The tears are nothing. The real sorrow is for that
old dream of nobility. All those gentlemen.
The wall
is the side of a building.
Maybe seventy-five feet high.
The rope is tied
below the top
and hangs down thirty feet.
Just hangs down.
Above the slum lot.
It’s been there a long time.
One part
below the middle
is frayed.
I’ve been at this all month.
Trying to see the rope.
The wall.
Carefully looking
at the bricks.
Seeing they are
umber and soot
and the color of tongue.
Even counting them.
But it’s like Poussin.
Too clear.
The way things aren’t.
So I try not staring.
Not grabbing.
Allowing it to come.
But just at the point
where I’d see,
the mind gives a little
skip
and I’m already past.
To all this sorrow again.
Considering
the skip between wildness
and affection,
where everything is.
