Authors: Jack Gilbert
From my hill I look down on the freeway and over
to a gull lifting black against the gray ridge.
It lifts slowly higher and enters the bright sky.
Surely our long, steady dying brings us to a state
of grace. What else can I call this bafflement?
From here I deal with my irrelevance to love.
With the bewildering tenderness of which I am
composed. The sun goes down and comes up again.
The moon comes up and goes down. I live
with the morning air and the different airs of night.
I begin to grow old.
The ships put out and are lost.
Put out and are lost.
Leaving me with their haunting awkwardness
and the imperfection of birds. While all the time
I work to understand this happiness I have come into.
What I remember of my nine-story fall
down through the great fir is the rush of green.
And the softness of my regret in the ambulance going
to my nearby death, looking out at the trees leaving me.
What I remember of my crushed spine
is seeing Linda faint again and again,
sliding down the white X‑ray room wall
as my sweet body flailed on the steel table
unable to manage the bulk of pain. That
and waiting in the years after for the burning
in my fingertips, which would announce,
the doctors said, the beginning of paralysis.
What I remember best of the four years of watching
in Greece and Denmark and London and Greece is Linda
making lunch. Her blondeness and ivory coming up
out of the blue Aegean. Linda walking with me daily
across the island from Monolithos to Thíra and back.
That’s what I remember most of death:
the gentleness of us in that bare Greek Eden,
the beauty as the marriage steadily failed.
Monolithos was four fisherman huts along the water,
a miniature villa closed for years, and our farmhouse
a hundred feet behind. Hot fields of barley, grapes,
and tomatoes stretching away three flat miles
to where the rest of the island used to be.
Where the few people live above the great cliffs.
A low mountain to the south and beyond that the earth
filled with pictures of Atlantis. On our wrong side
of the island were no people, cars, plumbing, or lights.
The summer skies and Mediterranean constantly. No trees.
Me cleaning squid. Linda getting up from a chair.
Watching my wife out in the full moon,
the sea bright behind her across the field
and through the trees. Eight years
and her love for me quieted away.
How fine she is. How hard we struggle.
Where the worms had opened the owl’s chest,
he could see, inside her frail ribs,
the city of Byzantium. Exquisitely made
of ironwood and brass. The pear trees around
the harem and the warships were perfectly detailed.
No wonder they make that mewing sound, he thought,
calling to each other among the dark arbors
while the cocks crow and answer and a farther
rooster answers that: the sound proceeding
up the mountain, paling and thinning until
it is transparent, like the faint baying of hounds.
I was walking through the harvested fields
tonight and got thinking about age.
Began wondering if my balance was gone.
So there I was out in the starlight
on one foot, swaying, and cheating.
The great light within the blackness shines out
as the cry of owls and tranced signaling of nightjars.
Birds who are vast cloud-chambers of the place I am
in my bright condition, a neighborhood I am the darkness of.
It should come from me as song and new flying
between the pale olive trees. But the calling of birds
in the silent dim fields is a translation I fail at,
despite the steady gladness where I have made landfall.
I go without audible music, flying heavily
from stone to stone in order to nest in marble.
Failing the harking, missing the hawking. Not managing
as a bird. Struggling through my career, blindly testing
the odor of all that whiteness night after night:
not sure if the old piss-smell is the scent of gods,
and knowing even that faint clue is fading as I hesitate.
Walking home across the plain in the dark.
And Linda crying. Again we have come
to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon
does not rise. We have only each other,
but I am shouting inside the rain
and she is crying like a wounded animal,
knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard
to understand how we could be brought here by love.
The sun is perfect, but it makes no nightingales sing.
The violence of light suppresses color in these fields,
its glare masking the green of the white grapes
and masking the heavy purple. Just as the moon now
finds no tinge in the giant oleander. Perhaps it is
bronze models for the spirit that endanger us.
I think of my years on the Greyhound bus, living with
the blank earth under the American sun day after day.
Leaking away into those distances. Waxing again
in the night while everyone slept and I watched
the old snow by the fences just after the headlights.
I used to blur in the dark thinking of the long counter
at Rock Springs day after tomorrow, my pleasure
of hunger merging with the bad food.
Memories make me grainy and distinct somewhere. Where
night shudders with a black fire of which Dante tells.
I begin the long inaccuracy alone.
Loneliness, they report, is a man’s fate.
A man’s fate, said Heraclitus, is his character.
I sit masturbating in the moonlight,
trying to find means for all of it.
The sea collapses, again and again, faintly behind me.
I walk down the dirt road, touch the cold Aegean,
and come back slowly. My hand drying in the night air.
Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels.
Which only we can translate into flesh.
The language to which we alone are native.
Our own bait. We are spirits housed in meat,
instantly opaque to the Lord. As Jesus.
We go into the deadfall of the body,
our hearts in their marvelous cases,
and discover new belfries everywhere.
I continued toward the Minotaur to keep
the thread taut. And suddenly, now,
immense flowers are coloring all
my stalked body. Making wine of me.
As bells get music of metal in the rain.
The prey I am willingly prospers.
The exile that comes on comes too late.
I go to it as Adam, singing across paradise.
Things that are themselves. Waves water, the rocks
stone. The smell of her arms. Stillness. Windstorms.
The long silence again. The well. The rabbit. Heat.
Nipples and long thighs. Her heavy bright mane.
Plunging water flashing as she washes her body in the sun.
“Perfect in whiteness.” Light going away every evening
like some great importance. Grapes outside the windows.
Linda talking less and less. Going down to the sea
while she sleeps. Standing in the cold water to my mouth
just before morning. Linda saying late in the day
we should eat now or it would be too dark to wash the dishes.
She going out quietly afterward to scream into the wind
from the ocean. Coming in. Lighting the lamps.
They were cutting the spring barley by fistfuls
when we came. Boys drove horses and mules over it
all day in threshing pits under the powerful sky.
They came from their white village on the horizon
for tomatoes in June. And later for grapes.
Now they are plowing in the cold wind. Yesterday
I burned my papers by the wall. This morning I look
back at the lone, shuttered farmhouse. Sun rising
over the volcano. At the full moon above the sea.
Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Rushed through the dark house.
Stopped, remembering. Stood looking
out at the bright moonlight on concrete.
I see them in black and white as they wait,
severely happy, in the sunlight of Thermopylae.
As Iseult and Beatrice are always black and white.
I imagine Helen in light, not hue. In my dreams,
Nausicaä is blanched colorless by noon.
And Botticelli’s Simonetta comes as faint tints of air.
Cleopatra is in color almost to the end.
Like Linda’s blondeness dyed by flowers and the sea.
I loved that wash of color, but remember her
mostly black and white. Mark Antony listening
to Hercules abandoning him listened in the dark.
In that finer time of day. In the essence, not the mode.
Thrushes flying under the lake. Nightingales singing underground.
Yes, my King. Paris hungry and leisurely just after the war. Yes.
America falling into history. Yes. Those silent winter afternoons
along the Seine when I was always alone. Yes, my King. Rain
everywhere in the forests of Pennsylvania as the king’s coach
lumbered and was caught and all stood gathered close
while the black trees went on and on. Ah, my King,
it was the sweet time of our lives: the rain shining on their faces,
the loud sound of rain around. Like the nights we waited,
knowing she was probably warm and moaning under someone else.
That cold mansard looked out over the huge hospital of the poor
and far down on Paris, gray and beautiful under the February rain.
Between that and this. That yes and this yes. Between, my King,
that forgotten girl, forgotten pain, and the consequence.
Those lovely, long-ago night bells that I did not notice grow
more and more apparent in me. Like pewter expanding as it cools.
Yes, like a king halted in the great forest of Pennsylvania.
Like me singing these prison songs to praise the gray,
to praise her, to tell of me, yes, and of you, my King.
He struggles to get the marble terrace clear
in his dreams. Broad steps going down.
A balustrade cut into the bright moonlight.
Love is pouring out and he is crying.
All the romantic equipment. But it is not that.
He looks down on the gray night in the black pool.
Sculpture glimmers in the weeds around it.
Why is the small-headed Artemis so moving,
and the Virtues with their pretty breasts?
He is not foolish. He knows better.
The scuffing of his shoes on the stairs is loud.
What is he searching for among the banal statues?
When he touches the chapped plinths, his spirit twangs.
Derision protects him less and less. He goes
shamelessly among them, trembling, fashioning a place.
Digging into the apple
with my thumbs.
Scraping out the clogged nails
and digging deeper.
Refusing the moon color.
Refusing the smell and memories.
Digging in with the sweet juice
running along my hands unpleasantly.
Refusing the sweetness.
Turning my hands to gouge out chunks.
Feeling the juice sticky
on my wrists. The skin itching.
Getting to the wooden part.
Getting to the seeds.
Going on.
Not taking anyone’s word for it.
Getting beyond the seeds.
We were talking about tent revivals
and softshell Baptists and the one-suspender Amish
and being told whistling on Sunday made the Madonna cry.
One fellow said he was raised in a church that taught
wearing yellow and black together was an important sin.
It got me thinking of the failed denomination
I was part of: that old false dream of woman.
I believed it was a triumph to have access to their mystery.
To see the hidden hair, to feel my spirit topple over,
to lie together in the afternoon while it rained
all the way to Indonesia. I had crazy ideas of what it was.
Like being in a dark woods at night
when an invisible figure crosses the stiff snow,
making a sound like some other planet’s machinery.
My brother’s girlfriend was not prepared for how much blood
splashed out. He got home in time, but was angry
about the mess she had made of his room. I stood behind,
watching them turn it into something manageable. Thinking
how frightening it must have been before things had names.
We say
peony
and make a flower out of that slow writhing.
Deal with the horror of recurrence by calling it
a million years. The death everywhere is no trouble
once you see it as nature, landscape, or botany.
The French woman says, Stop, you’re breaking my dress.
She tells him she must meet her friends in the Plaka.
His heels click back and forth. Stop that,
she says, you know I don’t like being hit.
More bickering and hitting and then her shutter
closes. Fifteen minutes later, the light goes on
and they are lovers. They speak to each other
in ordinary voices as I watch the moon rise.