Poet Island Press

---

3 Poems by Jack Gilbert

POSTED 2007-05-28 IN POEMS

Gilbert is the author of Refusing Heaven (2005), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1996). He has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Monolithos won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize, and Views of Jeopardy won the Yale Younger Poets Series. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

INFIDELITY

She is never dead when he meets her.
They eat noodles for breakfast as usual.
For eleven years he thought it was the river
at the bottom of his mind dreaming.
Now he knows she is living inside him,
as the wind is sometimes visible
in the trees. As the roses and rhubarb
are in the garden and then not.
Her ashes are by the sea in Kamakura.
Her face and hair and sweet body still
in the old villa on a mountain where
she lived the whole summer. They slept
on the floor for eleven years.
But now she comes less and less.

HORSES AT MIDNIGHT WITHOUT A MOON

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

THE FRIENDSHIP INSIDE US

Why the mouth? Why is it the mouth we put to mouth
at the final moments? Why not the famous groin?
Because the groin is far away.
The mouth is close up against the spirit.
We couple desperately all night before setting out
for years in prison. But that is the body’s goodbye.
We kiss the person we love last thing before
the coffin is shut, because it is our being
touching the unknown. A kiss is the frontier in us.
It is where the courting becomes the courtship,
where the dancing ends and the dance begins.
The mouth is our chief access to the intimacy
in which she made reside. Her mouth is the porch
of the brain. The forecourt of the heart.
The way to the mystery enthroned. Where we meet
momentarily amid the seraphim and the powers.

back ...

---