Woke up suddenly thinking I heard crying.
Stopped, remembering. Stood lookingout at bright moonlight on concrete.
Jack Gilbert
Going Wrong
The fish are dreadful. They are brought upthe mountain in the dawn most days, beautifuland alien and cold from night under the sea,the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.Soft machinery of the dark, the man thinks,washing them. ‘What can you know of my machinery!’demands the Lord. Sure, the man says quietlyand cuts into them,…
Love is apart from all things.
It is not the body that finds love.What leads us there is the body.What is not love provokes it.What is not love quenches it.Love lays hold of everything we know.The passions which are called lovealso change everything to a newnessat first. Passion is clearly the pathbut does not bring us to love.It opens the castle…
Poetry is a kind of lying,
or beauty. But also inthat truth may be told only so.Those who, admirably, refuseto falsify (as those who will notrisk pretensions) are excludedfrom saying even so much.Degas said he didn’t paintwhat he saw, but whatwould enable them to seethe thing he had.
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the wordsget it all wrong. We say bread and it means accordingto which nation. French has no word for home,and we have no word for strict pleasure. A peoplein northern India is dying out because their ancienttongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lostvocabularies…
In the small towns along the river
Summer weeks stalled forever,and long marriages always the same.Lives with only emergencies, births,and fishing for excitement. Then a shipcomes out of the mist. Or comes aroundthe bend carefully one morningin the rain, past the pines and shrubs.Arrives on a hot fragrant night,grandly, all lit up. Gone two dayslater, leaving fury in its wake.
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.We can break through marriage into marriage.By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyondaffection and wade mouth-deep into love.We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.But going back toward childhood will not help.The village is not better than Pittsburgh.Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.Rome is…
There was no water at my grandfather’s
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,past the cow by the foundation wherethe fine people’s house was beforethey arranged to have it burned down.To the neighbor’s cool well. Wouldcome back with pails too heavy,so my mouth pulled out of shape.I see myself, but from the outside.I keep trying to feel who I was,and cannot. Hear…
Suddenly this defeat.
The blues gone grayAnd the browns gone grayAnd yellowA terrible amber.In the cold streetsYour warm body.In whatever roomYour warm body.Among all the peopleYour absenceThe people who are alwaysNot you.I have been easy with treesToo long.Too familiar with mountains.Joy has been a habit.NowSuddenlyThis rain.Anonymous submission.
There is always the harrowing by mortality,
Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alivein the difficult way adults want to be alive.It is worth having the heart broken,a blessing to hurt for eighteen yearsbecause a woman is dead. He thinks of longbefore that, the summer he was with Giannaand her sister in Apulia. Having outwittedthe General, their father, and driven southto…