Meanwhile

It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees
along the river, it is waiting. it has waited a long time.
In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.
Now it waits in New England while I say grace over
almost everything: for a possum dead on someone's lawn,
the single light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,
and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets
are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side
with barley. Loneliness is the mother's milk of America.
The heart is a foreign country whose language none
of us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods,
but already it looks discarded as the birds return
and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power
or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.
My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing
and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up. 

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Getting Away with It

We have already lived in the real paradise.

Horses in the empty summer street.

Me eating the hot wurst I couldn’t afford,

in frozen Munich, tears dropping. We can

remember. A child in the outfield waiting

for the last fly ball of the year. So dark

already it was black against heaven.

The voices trailing away to dinner,

calling faintly in the immense distance.

Standing with my hands open, watching it

curve over and start down, turning white

at the last second. Hands down. Flourishing.

By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.

For eleven years I have regretted it,

regretted that I did not do what

I wanted to do as I sat there those

four hours watching her die. I wanted

to crawl in among the machinery

and hold her in my arms, knowing

the elementary, leftover bit of her

mind would dimly recognize it was me

carrying her to where she was going.

Happening Apart from What's Happening Around It

There is a vividness to eleven years of love

because it is over. A clarity of Greece now

because I live in Manhattan or New England.

If what is happening is part of what's going on

around what's occurring, it is impossible

to know what is truly happening. If love is

part of the passion, part of the fine food

or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not

clear what the love is. When I was walking

in the mountains with the Japanese man and began

to hear the water, he said, "What is the sound

of the waterfall?" "Silence," he finally told me.

The stillness I did not notice until the sound

of water falling made apparent the silence I had

been hearing long before. I ask myself what

is the sound of women? What is the word for

that still thing I have hunted inside them

for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,

the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still

in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper

down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,

where something very far in that body

is becoming something we don't have a name for.

I Imagine the Gods

I imagine the gods saying, We will

make it up to you. We will give you

three wishes, they say. Let me see

the squirrels again, I tell them.

Let me eat some of the great hog

stuffed and roasted on its giant spit

and put out, steaming, into the winter

of my neighborhood when I was usually

too broke to afford even the hundred grams

I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,

past the Street of the Moon

and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,

the Street of Silence and the Street

of the Little Pissing. We can give you

wisdom, they say in their rich voices.

Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,

the Algerian student with her huge eyes

who timidly invited me to her room

when I was too young and bewildered

that first year in Paris.

Let me at least fail at my life.

Think, they say patiently, we could

make you famous again. Let me fall

in love one last time, I beg them.

Teach me mortality, frighten me

into the present. Help me to find

the heft of these days. That the nights

will be full enough and my heart feral.

Worth

It astonished him when he got to Katmandu to hear

the man from the embassy say a friend was waiting

outside of customs. It was the Australian woman

he had met in Bali. His fault for running back

across the tarmac when he realized she was crying.

Kissing her while the plane waited with the door open.

Wanting her to feel valuable. Now she had used up all

her money flying to Nepal. Calling what had been

what it was not. Now lying awkwardly on the bed

for a month, marooned in the heat, the Himalayas

above the window. As he watched the delicate dawns

and the old women carrying too much firewood down

from the mountain on their backs. Him thinking of their

happiness up in the lush green terraces of rice.

Remembering her laughter as he came out of the shower,

saying the boy had come again with a plate of melon.

"He asked if you were my husband," she said, "and I

said you were my father." Her eyes merry. Now they sat

in cheap restaurants trying to find anything to say.

Remembering how beautiful she was the first time

coming through the palm trees of the compound at dusk.

Tall and thin in a purple dress that reached to her

bare feet. Watching while he played chess with

the Austrian photographer all night. Now calling

that good thing by the wrong name. Destroying

something valuable. Innocently killing backwards.

Trying to have something left over

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

The Abandoned Valley

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

Alone

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody's dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.

That makes her happy the way it always did.
-Jack Gilbert

antelope standing in the dawn mist

Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that.

~From Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert

Highlights and Interstices

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

~Jack Gilbert