Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert Page A

shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
    To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
    comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
    all the years of sorrow that are to come.
NAKED EXCEPT FOR THE JEWELRY
    “And,” she said, “you must talk no more
    about ecstasy. It is a loneliness.”
    The woman wandered about picking up
    her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”
    the man said. “We tell lies,” she said,
    brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
    for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”
    “You were helpless with joy,” he said,
    “moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said,
    “we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.
    The heart lies to itself because it must.”
PUT HER IN THE FIELDS FOR KINDNESS
    The door was in the whitewashed eight-foot walls
    of the narrow back street common to Greek islands.
    Beautiful light and shade in the clear air.
    The big iron bolt was on the outside locking
    something in. Some days the pounding inside
    made the heavy wooden door shudder. Often a voice
    screaming. The crazy old woman, people said.
    She would hurt the children if they let her out.
    Pinch them or scare them, they said.
    Sometimes everything was still and I would delay
    until I heard the tiny whimper that meant she knew
    I was there. Late one afternoon on my way for oil,
    the door was broken. She was in the lot opposite
    in weeds by the wall, her dress pulled up, pissing.
    Like a cow. Able to manage, quiet in the last light.
WHAT SONG SHOULD WE SING
    The massive overhead crane comes
    when we wave to it, lets down
    its heavy claws and waits tamely
    within its power while we hook up
    the slabs of three-quarter-inch
    steel. Takes away the ponderous
    reality when we wave again.
    What name do we have for that?
    What song is there for its voice?
    What is the other face of Yahweh?
    The god who made the slug and ferret,
    the maggot and shark in his image.
    What is the carol for that?
    Is it the song of nevertheless,
    or of the empire of our heart? We carry
    language as our mind, but are we
    the dead whale that sinks grandly
    for years to reach the bottom of us?
HAVING THE HAVING
    For Gianna
    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 of her body, nor her clean
    mouth. They cannot describe, but they
    can prevent remembering it wrong.
    The knots recall. The knots
    are blazons marking the trail
    back to what we own and imperfectly
    forget. Back to a bell ringing
    far off, and the sweet summer darkening.
    All but a little of it blurs and leaks
    away, but that little is most of it,
    even damaged. Two more knots
    and then just straight string.
SAY YOU LOVE ME
    Are the angels of her bed the angels
    who come near me alone in mine?
    Are the green trees in her window
    the color I see in ripe plums?
    If she always sees backward
    and upside down without knowing it
    what chance do we have? I am haunted
    by the feeling that she is saying
    melting lords of death, avalanches,
    rivers and moments of passing through.
    And I am replying, “Yes, yes.
    Shoes and pudding.”
KUNSTKAMMER
    We are resident inside with the machinery,
    a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.
    We exist with a wind whispering inside
    and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,
    inside the basilica of bones. The flesh
    is a neighborhood, but not the life.
    Our body is not good at memory, at keeping.
    It is the spirit that holds on to our treasure.
    The dusk in Italy when the ferry passed Bellagio
    and turned across Lake Como in the hush to where
    we would land and start up the grassy mountain.
    The body keeps so little of the life after
    being with her eleven years,
    and the mouth not even that much. But the heart
    is different. It never forgets
    the pine trees with the moon