The Lost Hotels of Paris The Lord gives everything and chargesby taking it back. What a bargain.Like being young for a while. We areallowed to visit hearts of women,to go into their bodies so we feelno longer alone. We are permittedromantic love with it’s bounty and half-lifeof two years. It is right to mournfor the… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling. —… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the acquiescence to death beginning. — Jack… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
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. — Jack Gilbert, from “Infidelity,” Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)
I tie knots in the strings of my spirit to remember. They are not pictures of what was. Not accounts of dusk amid the olive trees and that odor. The walking back was the arriving. For that there are three knots and a space and another two close together. They do not imitate the inside… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
What we are given is taken away, but we manage to keep it secretly. We lose everything, but make harvest of the consequence it was to us. Memory builds this kingdom from the fragments and approximation. We are gleaners who fill the barn for the winter that comes on. — Jack Gilbert, from “Moreover,” Refusing… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
Poem For Laura Now come the bright prophets across my life. The solemn fl esh, the miracles, and the pain. Across the simple meadows of my heart, splendidly you come promising sorrow. And knowing, I bless your coming with trees of love, singing, singing even to the night. The princely mornings will fail when you… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
Across the simple meadows of my heart, splendidly you come promising sorrow. And knowing, I bless your coming with trees of love, singing, singing even to the night. — Jack Gilbert, from “Poem for Laura,” Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)
Angelus Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels. Which only we can translate into flesh. The language to which we alone are native. Our own bait. We are spirits housed in meat, instantly opaque to the Lord. As Jesus. We go into the deadfall of the body, our hearts in their marvelous cases and discover new belfries everywhere.… Continue reading Jack Gilbert
The Vale of Soul-Making 