Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert Page B

is still time.
SONATINA
    She told about when the American soldiers
    came to the island. How the spirits would cling
    to the wire fence and watch their bigness
    and blondness, often without shirts, working
    in the sunlight. So different from reality.
    So innocent and laughing, as though it were
    simple to be happy and kind. And their smell!
    They had a smell that made the spirits shiver
    and yearn to be material. She said that
    the spirits would push long thin poles,
    ivory in the moonlight, silently through
    the fence, trying to touch the whiteness
    those sleeping men had around their hearts.
FORAGING FOR WOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN
    The wild up here is not creatures, wooded,
    tangled wild. It is absence wild.
    Barren, empty, stone wild. Worn-away wild.
    Only the smell of weeds and hot air.
    But a place where differences are clear.
    Between the mind’s severity and its harshness.
    Between honesty and the failure of belief.
    A man said no person is educated who knows
    only one language, for he cannot distinguish
    between his thought and the English version.
    Up here he is translated to a place where it is
    possible to discriminate between age and sorrow.
IN UMBRIA
    Once upon a time I was sitting outside the café
    watching twilight in Umbria when a girl came
    out of the bakery with the bread her mother wanted.
    She did not know what to do. Already bewildered
    by being thirteen and just that summer a woman,
    she now had to walk past the American.
    But she did fine. Went by and around the corner
    with style, not noticing me. Almost perfect.
    At the last instant could not resist darting a look
    down at her new breasts. Often I go back
    to that dip of her head when people talk
    about this one or that one of the great beauties.
CONCEIVING HIMSELF
    Night after night after hot night in the clearing.
    Stars, odor of damp grass, the faint sound of waves.
    The palm trees around hardly visible, and the smell
    of the jungle beyond. Hour after hour of the drumming
    on bells, while young girls danced elegantly in their
    heavy golden costumes. Afterward, groping his way
    back along the dirt paths through blackness, dazed
    by the trembling music, the dancing, and their hands.
    (Pittsburgh so long ago. The spoor of someone inside
    him. Knowing it sometimes waiting for a train in snow,
    or just a moment while eating figs in a stony field.)
    One evening the rain spilled down and he ran into
    the tent behind the altar, where dancers and musicians
    crowded together in the unnatural light of a Coleman
    lantern: the girls undressing, rain in their hair,
    the delicate faces still painted, their teeth white
    as they laughed. None speaking English, their language
    impossible. The man finally backstage in his life.
CHASTITY
    A boy sits on the porch of a wooden house,
    reading
War and Peace.
    Down below, it is Sunday afternoon in August.
    The street is deserted except
    for the powerful sun. There is a sound,
    and he looks. At the bottom of the long
    flight of steps, a man has fallen.
    The boy gets up, not wanting to.
    All year he has thought about honesty,
    and he sits down. Two people finally come
    and call the ambulance.
    But too late. When everybody is gone,
    he reads some pages, and stops.
    Sits a moment, turns back to the place,
    and starts again.
ME AND CAPABLANCA
    The sultry first night of July, he on the bed
    reading one of Chandler’s lesser novels.
    What he should be doing is in the other room.
    Today he began carrying wood up from the valley,
    already starting on winter. He closes the book
    and goes naked into the pitch pines and the last
    half-hour of the dark. Rain makes a sound
    on the birches and a butternut tree. There is not
    enough time left to use it for dissatisfaction.
    Often it is hard to know when the middle game
    is over and the end game beginning, the pure part
    that is made more of craft than it is of magic.
A GHOST SINGS, A DOOR OPENS
    Maybe when something stops, something lost in us
    can be heard, like the young woman’s voice