Collected Poems

Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert Page A

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Authors: Jack Gilbert
manages like somebody carrying a box
    that is too heavy, first with his arms
    underneath. When their strength gives out,
    he moves the hands forward, hooking them
    on the corners, pulling the weight against
    his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
    when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
    different muscles take over. Afterward,
    he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
    drains out of the arm that is stretched up
    to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
    the man can hold underneath again, so that
    he can go on without ever putting the box down.
GHOSTS
    I heard a noise this morning and found two old men
    leaning on the wall of my vineyard, looking out
    over the fields, silent. Went back to my desk
    until somebody raised the trap door of the well.
    It was the one with the cane, looking down inside.
    But I was annoyed when the locked door rattled where
    the grain and wine were. Went to the kitchen window
    and stared at him. He said something in Greek.
    I spread my arms to ask what he was doing.
    He explained about growing up out there long ago.
    That now they were making a little walk among
    the old places. Telling it with his hands.
    He made a final gesture, rubbing the side
    of the first finger against that of the other hand.
    I think it meant how much he felt about being here
    again. We smiled, even though he was half blind.
    Later, my bucket banged and I saw the heavy one
    pulling up water. He cleaned the mule’s stone basin
    carefully with his other hand. Put back a rock
    for the doves to stand on and poured in fresh water.
    Stayed there, touching the old letters cut in the marble.
    I watched them go slowly down the lane and out
    of sight. They did not look back. As I typed,
    I listened for the dog at each farm to tell me
    which house they went to next. But the dogs did not
    bark all the way down the long bright valley.
HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS
    We think the fire eats the wood.
    We are wrong. The wood reaches out
    to the flame. The fire licks at
    what the wood harbors, and the wood
    gives itself away to that intimacy,
    the manner in which we and the world
    meet each new day. Harm and boon
    in the meetings. As heart meets what
    is not heart, the way the spirit
    encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
    the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
    looking at the ruin of our garden
    in the early dark of November, hearing crows
    go over while the first snow shines coldly
    everywhere. Grief makes the heart
    apparent as much as sudden happiness can.
MAN AT A WINDOW
    He stands there baffled by pleasure and how little
    it counts. The long woman is finally asleep on the bed,
    the sweat beautiful on her New England nakedness.
    It was while he was walking toward the shuttered window
    with sunlight blazing behind it that something
    important happened. He looks down through the gap
    between the shutters at the Romans and late summer
    in the via del Corso, trying to find a name for it,
    knowing it is not love. Nor tenderness. He considers
    other times just after, the random intensity sliding away,
    unrecoverable. It is the sorrow that stays clear.
    This specialness inside his spirit is bonded to
    a knowing he cannot remember. When he was crushed,
    each minor shift of his body traced out the bones
    with agony, making his skeleton more and more clear
    inside him. As though floodlit. He remembers
    the intricate way he would lift his arm from the bed
    in the hospital, turning his hand cautiously this way
    and that to find the bearable paths through the air,
    discovering an inch here and there where the pain
    was missing. Or the cold and hunger as he walked
    the alleys all night that winter down by the docks
    of Genoa until each dawn, when he held the hot bowls
    of tripe in his numb hands, the steam rising into his face
    as he drank, the tears mixing with happiness. He opens
    the shutters, and the shutters of the other window,
    so the Mediterranean light can get to her. Desperately
    trying to break the code while there

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