#jack gilbert
So I got this dumb cold on our last day in Venice (also my birthday), and then we flew back to New York and it become exponentially worse and morphed into some kind of terrible flu, and I have been sick in bed all week and have missed FIVE DAYS of poetry posts, which is the most I have missed since, like, 2008. I’m going to make up for it by posting a few extra poems over the next few days, probably entirely at random. I mean, it’s been ten years, I feel like I can probably be a little bit of a poetry maverick at this point.
Anyway, here is a Jack Gilbert poem for today:Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
—Jack Gilbert (1925-2012), “Failing and Flying,” from Refusing Heaven, 2005.
They have not lit the lamp at the other farm yet
and all at once I feel lonely. What a surprise.
But the air stills, the heat comes back
and I think I am all right again.
—Jack Gilbert, from “A Close Call”
(Photograph by D. B. Abacahin)
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“The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at.”
—Jack Gilbert, from “Meanwhile” (The Dance Most of All)
(Photograph by Aiala Hernando. Thank you, Ms. Hernando and Cereal.)
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Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
Walking in the dark streets of Seoul
under the almost full moon.
Lost for the last two hours.
Finishing a loaf of bread
and worried about the curfew.
I have not spoken for three days
and I am thinking, “Why not just
settle for love? Why not just
settle for love instead?”
