Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert Page B

rising behind them
    every night. Again and again we put our
    sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed
    them back into their death, each moving slowly
    into the dark, disappearing as our hearts
    visited and savored, hurt and yearned.
HALLOWEEN
    There were a hundred wild people in Allen’s
    three-story house. He was sitting at a small
    table in the kitchen quietly eating something.
    Alone, except for Orlovsky’s little brother
    who was asleep with his face against the wall.
    Allen wearing a red skullcap, and a loose bathrobe
    over his nakedness. Shoulder-length hair
    and a chest-length, oily beard.
    No one was within fifteen years of him. Destroyed
    like the rest of that clan. His remarkable
    talent destroyed. The fine mind grown more
    and more simple. Buddhist chants, impoverishing
    poems. There are no middle tones in the paintings
    of children. Chekhov said he didn’t want
    the audience to cry, but to see. Allen showing
    me his old man’s bald scalp. A kind of love.
    Aachen is a good copy of a mediocre building.
    Architects tried for two thousand years to find
    a way to put a dome on a square base.
ELEGY FOR BOB (JEAN MCLEAN)
    Only you and I still stand in the snow on Highland Avenue
    in Pittsburgh waiting for the blundering iron streetcars
    that never came. Only you know how the immense storms
    over the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers were the scale
    I wanted. Nobody but you remembers Peabody High School.
    You shared my youth in Paris and the hills above Como.
    And later, in Seattle. It was you playing the aria from
    Don Giovanni
over and over, filling the forest of Puget
    Sound with the music. You in the front room and me
    upstairs with your discarded wife in my bed. The sound
    of your loneliness pouring over our happy bodies.
    You were with your third wife when I was in Perugia
    six months later, but in love with somebody else.
    We searched for her in Munich, the snow falling again.
    You trying to decide when to kill yourself. All of it
    finally bringing us to San Francisco. To the vast
    decaying white house. No sound of Mozart coming up
    from there. No alleluias in you anymore. No longer
    will you waltz under the chandeliers in Paris salons
    drunk with champagne and the Greek girl as the others
    stand along the mirrored walls. The men watching
    with fury, the eyes of the women inscrutable. No one
    else speaks the language of those years. No one
    remembers you as the Baron. The streetcars have
    finished the last run, and I am walking home. Thinking
    love is not refuted because it comes to an end.
RÉSUMÉ
    Easter on the mountain. The hanging goat roasted
    with lemon, pepper and thyme. The American hacks off
    the last of the meat, gets out the remaining
    handfuls from the spine. Grease up to the elbows,
    his face smeared and his heart blooming. The satisfied
    farmers watch his fervor with surprise.
    When the day begins to cool, he makes his way down
    the trails. Down from that holiday energy
    to the silence of his real life, where he will
    wash in cold water by kerosene light, happy
    and alone. A future inch by inch, rock by rock,
    by the green wheat and the ripe wheat later.
    By basil and dove tower and white doves turning
    in the brilliant sky. The ghosts of his other world
    crowding around, surrounding him with himself.
    Tomato by tomato, canned fish in the daily stew.
    He sits outside on the wall of his vineyard
    as night rises from the parched earth and the sea
    darkens in the distance. Insistent stars and him
    singing in the quiet. Flesh of the spirit and soul
    of the body. The clarity that does so much damage.
MORE THAN SIXTY
    Out of money, so I’m sitting in the shade
    of my farmhouse cleaning the lentils
    I found in the back of the cupboard.
    Listening to the cicada in the fig tree
    mix with the cooing doves on the roof.
    I look up when I hear a goat hurt far down
    the valley and discover the sea
    exactly the same blue I used to paint it
    with my watercolors as a child.
    So what, I think happily. So