THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Poems in this collection originally appeared in the following works: Views of Jeopardy, copyright © 1962 by Yale University Press (Yale University Press, 1962); Monolithos, copyright © 1963, 1965, 1966, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); The Great Fires, copyright © 1994 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Refusing Heaven, copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); and The Dance Most of All, copyright © 2009 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
Poems collected here for the first time were originally published in the following publications:
The Kenyon Review: “Secrets of Poetry”; The New Republic: “Spring”; The New Yorker: “Convalescing.”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilbert, Jack, [date]
[Poems, Selections]
Collected poems / by Jack Gilbert.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96074-0
I. Title.
PS3557.I34217A6 2012
811’.54—dc23
2011025743
Cover image: Jack, 1960, woodcut by
Gianna Gelmetti (1937–2010)
Cover design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1_r1
For Gianna Gelmetti, Michiko Nogami, and Linda Gregg
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
VIEWS OF JEOPARDY [1962]
In Dispraise of Poetry
Perspective He Would Mutter Going to Bed
Elephants
And She Waiting
It May Be No One Should Be Opened
House on the California Mountain
Myself Considered as the Monster in the Foreground
In Perugino We Have Sometimes Seen Our Country
A Poem for the Fin Du Monde Man
Rain
County Musician
Malvolio in San Francisco
Orpheus in Greenwich Village
Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell
Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell (II)
Before Morning in Perugia
Midnight Is Made of Bricks
The Night Comes Every Day to My Window
Meelee’s Away
The Abnormal Is Not Courage
Lions
Susanna and the Elders
The Four Perfectly Tangerines
The First Morning of the World on Long Island
I’ll Try to Explain About the Fear
Poem for Laura
New York, Summer
The Bay Bridge from Potrero Hill
On Growing Old in San Francisco
Without Watteau, Without Burckhardt, Oklahoma
Letter to Mr. John Keats
Portolano
It Is Clear Why the Angels Come No More
The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades
MONOLITHOS: Poems 1962 and 1982 [1982]
ONE—1962
Between Poems
The Plundering of Circe
Islands and Figs
Poetry Is a Kind of Lying
For Example
The Sirens Again
Alba
Ostinato rigore
A Bird Sings to Establish Frontiers
Bartleby at the Wall
TWO—[MONOLITHOS]—1982
All the Way from There to Here
Not Part of Literature
Trying to Be Married
Registration
More Than Friends
That Tenor of Which the Night Birds Are a Vehicle
Walking Home Across the Island
Mistrust of Bronze
Angelus
A Kind of World
Leaving Monolithos
Divorce
Remembering My Wife
Pewter
Night After Night
Hunger
Sects
They Call It Attempted Suicide
Meniscus
Who’s There
Meaning Well
Template
Siege
Translation into the Original
Burning and Fathering: Accounts of My Country
The Fashionable Heart
Breakfast
Losing
The Rainy Forests of Northern California
Il mio tesoro
Don Giovanni in Trouble
The Movies
Byzantium Burning
They Will Put My Body into the Ground
Love Poem
Elephant Hunt in Guadalajara
Pavane
Loyalty
Song
Getting Ready
Sul ponticello
The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon
A Description of Happiness in København
New Hampshire Marble
My Marriage with Mrs. Johnson
Games
My Graveyard in Tokyo
Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan
Textures
The Revolution
Mexico
Another Grandfather
Singing in My Difficult Mountains
Threshing the Fire
THE GREAT FIRES: Poems 1982–1992 [1994]
Going Wrong
Guilty
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
Lovers
Measuring the Tyger
Voices Inside and Out
Tear It Down
Dante Dancing
The Great Fires
Finding Something
Prospero Without His Magic
Finding Eurydice
Going There
Haunted Importantly
Searching for Pittsburgh
Married
Explicating the Twilight
Steel Guitars
Recovering amid the Farms
The Spirit and the Soul
To See If Something Comes Next
A Stubborn Ode
Scheming in the Snow
Ruins and Wabi
Betrothed
Trying to Have Something Left Over
On Stone
Relative Pitch
1953
Alone
Adulterated
What Is There to Say?
Prospero Dreams of Arnaut Daniel Inventing Love in the Twelfth Century
Tasters for the Lord
Carrying Torches at Noon
A Year Later
Looking Away from Longing
Factoring
The Milk of Paradise
Gift Horses
Hard Wired
The White Heart of God
Michiko Nogami (1946–1982)
The Container for the Thing Contained
Moment of Grace
The Lord Sits with Me Out in Front
Between Aging and Old
The History of Men
Older Women
Exceeding
Infidelity
Highlights and Interstices
Peaches
Music Is the Memory of What Never Happened
Alternatives
Michiko Dead
Ghosts
Harm and Boon in the Meetings
Man at a Window
Sonatina
Foraging for Wood on the
Mountain
In Umbria
Conceiving Himself
Chastity
Me and Capablanca
A Ghost Sings, a Door Opens
I Imagine the Gods
Thinking About Ecstasy
Night Songs and Day Songs
Eating with the Emperor
Playing House
Beyond Beginnings
Theoretical Lives
From These Nettles, Alms
Hot Nights in Florida
Getting It All
The Edge of the World
Leporello on Don Giovanni
First Times
Half the Truth
Respect
The Lives of Famous Men
Getting Old
How to Love the Dead
Almost Happy
REFUSING HEAVEN [2005]
A Brief for the Defense
Naked Except for the Jewelry
Put Her in the Fields for Kindness
What Song Should We Sing
Having the Having
Say You Love Me
Kunstkammer
Halloween
Elegy for Bob (Jean McLean)
Résumé
More than Sixty
By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.
Once upon a Time
A Close Call
The Rooster
Failing and Flying
Burning (Andante non troppo)
The Other Perfection
A Ball of Something
Getting Away with It
Truth
Transgressions
The Abandoned Valley
Happening Apart from What’s Happening Around It
Exceeding the Spirit
How Much of That Is Left in Me?
’Tis Here! ’Tis Here! ’Tis Gone! (The Nature of Presence)
Ambition
Being Young Back Then
Not Getting Closer
Adults
Seen from Above
Getting Closer
The Mail
Less Being More
Homage to Wang Wei
The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper
Doing Poetry
Homesteading
The Sweet Taste of the Night
Honor
Trying to Write Poetry
A Kind of Courage
Happily Planting the Beans Too Early
What to Want
Bring in the Gods
The Negligible
The Lost Hotels of Paris
Feathers or Lead
What Plenty
The Garden
Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played
Winning on the Black
Refusing Heaven
The Friendship Inside Us
A Thanksgiving Dance
Horses at Midnight Without a Moon
Immaculate
Moreover
A Kind of Decorum
A Walk Blossoming
Farming in Secret
December Ninth, 1960
Not the Happiness but the Consequence of Happiness
Infidelity
The Reinvention of Happiness
Looking at Pittsburgh from Paris
“My Eyes Adored You”
Beyond Pleasure
Duende
The Good Life
Flat Hedgehogs
Prospero Listening to the Night
The End of Paradise
The Lost World
Maybe Very Happy
The Manger of Incidentals
The Thirty Favorite Lives: Amager
Burma
What I’ve Got
Trouble
In the Beginning
Métier
Yelapa
A Taste for Grit and Whatever
Maybe She Is Here
THE DANCE MOST OF ALL [2009]
Everywhere and Forever
Painting on Plato’s Wall
Alyosha
Winter in the Night Fields
Ovid in Tears
The Spell Cast Over
South
Neglecting the Kids
Dreaming at the Ballet
Elegy
After Love
Waiting and Finding
Winter Happiness in Greece
Meanwhile
The Abundant Little
Worth
Perfected
Living Hungry After
The Mistake
A Fact
Becoming Regardless
The Secret
The New Bride Almost Visible in Latin
The Danger of Wisdom
Searching for It in a Guadalajara Dance Hall
Triangulating
The Difficult Beauty
Growing Up in Pittsburgh
Infectious
Piecing of the Life
Not Easily
Crossing the Border, Searching for the City
Crusoe on the Mountain Gathering Faggots
Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
Going Home
Getting It Right
Aloneness
Feeling History
To Know the Invisible
Prospero Goes Home
Naked Without Intent
Trying
The Answer
The Gros Ventre
Waking at Night
Cherishing What Isn’t
Valley of the Spirits
Suddenly Adult
We Are the Junction
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
Valley of the Owls
This Times That
Spring
A Man in Black and White
Winter Happiness
May I, May I
The Winnowing
Thirty Favorite Times
Blinded by Seeing
The Greek Gods Don’t Come in Winter
The Cargo and the Equity
The Stockton Tunnel
Holding On to My Friend
Secrets of Poetry
Ars poetica
Meniscus: Or How the Heart Must Not Be Too Much Questioned
The Companion
The Ring
Lust
The Sixth Meditation: Faces of God
Convalescing
Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
A Note About The Author
Other Books by This Author
VIEWS OF
JEOPARDY
[1962]
IN DISPRAISE OF POETRY
When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.
PERSPECTIVE HE WOULD MUTTER GOING TO BED
For Robert Duncan
“Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed.
“Oh che dolce cosa è questa
prospettiva.” Uccello. Bird.
And I am as greedy of her, that the black
horse of the literal world might come
directly on me. Perspective. A place
to stand. To receive. A place to go
into from. The earth by language.
Who can imagine antelope silent
under the night rain, the Gulf
at Biloxi at night else? I remember
in Mexico a man and a boy painting
an adobe house magenta and crimson
who thought they were painting it red. Or pretty.
So neither saw the brown mountains
move to manage that great house.
The horse wades in the city of grammar.
ELEPHANTS
For Jean McLean
The great foreign trees and turtles burn
as Pharos, demanding my house continue ahead.
In my blood all night the statues counsel return.
I walk my mornings in hope of tigers that yearn
for absolute orchards and the grace of rivers, but instead
the great foreign trees and turtles burn
down my life, driving my hands from the fern
of tenderness that crippled and stopped the Roman bed
in my blood. All night the statues counsel return
even so, gesturing toward Cézanne and stern
styles of voyaging broken and blessed. “It is the dead
the great foreign trees and turtles burn
to momentary brilliance,” they say. “Such as earn
their heat only from the violation they wed.”
In my blood all night the statues counsel return
to the measure that passionate Athenian dancers learn.
But though I assent, the worn elephants that bred
the great foreign trees and turtles burn
in my blood all night the statues, counsel, return.
AND SHE WAITING
Always I have been afraid
of this moment:
of the return to love
with perspective.
I see these breasts
with the others.
I touch this mouth
and the others.
I command this heart
as the others.
I know exactly
what to say.
Innocence has gone
out of me.
The song.
The song, suddenly,
has gone out
of me.
IT MAY BE NO ONE SHOULD BE OPENED
You know I am serious about the whales.
Their moving vast through that darkness,
silent.
It is intolerable.
Or Crivelli, with his fruit.
The Japanese.
Or the white flesh of casaba melons
always in darkness.
That darkness unopened from the beginning.
The small emptiness at the middle
in darkness.
As virgins.
The landscape unlighted.
Lighted by me.
Lighted as my hands
in the darkroom
pinching film on the spindle
in absolute dark.
The work difficult
and my hands soon large and brilliant.
Virgins.
Whales.
Darkness and Lauds.
But it may be that no one should be opened.
The deer come back to the feeding station
at the suddenly open season.
The girls find second loves.
Semele was blasted
looking on the whale
in even his lesser panoply.
It was the excellent Socrates ruined Athens.
Now you have fallen crazy
and I have run away.