foraging for wood on the mountain

The wild up here is not creatures, wooded,

tangled wild. It is absence wild.

Barren, empty, stone wild. Worn-away wild.

Only the smell of weeds and hot air.

But a place where differences are clear.

Between the mind’s severity and its harshness.

Between honesty and the failure of belief.

A man said no person is educated who knows

only one language, for he cannot distinguish

between his thought and the English version.

Up here he is translated to a place where it is

possible to discriminate between age and sorrow.

.

~ Jack Gilbert

.

horses at midnight without a moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.

Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down

but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

The summer mornings begin inch by inch

while we sleep, and walk with us later

as long-legged beauty through

the dirty streets. It is no surprise

that danger and suffering surround us.

What astonishes is the singing.

We know the horses are there in the dark

meadow because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling

through the frozen valley

who suddenly smells flowers

and realizes the snow is melting

out of sight on top of the mountain,

knows that spring has begun.

 ~ Jack Gilbert

from Refusing Heaven

music is in the piano only when it is being played

Jack Gilbert: 1925-2012 (Photo by Robert Toby)

We are not one with this world. We are not

the complexity our body is, nor the summer air

idling in the big maple without purpose.

We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves

as it passes through. We are not the wood

any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage

between the two. We are certainly not the lake

nor the fish in it, but the something that is

pleased by them. We are the stillness when

a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of

insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident

when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part

of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists

only in the singing, and is not the singer.

God does not live among the church bells

but is briefly resident there. We are occasional

like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed

with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold

on to the enterprise under way in our chest.

Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what

walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat

and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

He continues past the nunnery to the old villa

where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides

touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,

which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

~  Jack Gilbert

music is in the piano only when it is played

.

.

We are not one with this world. We are not

the complexity our body is, nor the summer air

idling in the big maple without purpose.

We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves

as it passes through. We are not the wood

any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage

between the two. We are certainly not the lake

nor the fish in it, but the something that is

pleased by them. We are the stillness when

a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of

insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident

when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part

of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists

only in the singing, and is not the singer.

God does not live among the church bells

but is briefly resident there. We are occasional

like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed

with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold

on to the enterprise under way in our chest.

Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what

walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat

and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

He continues past the nunnery to the old villa

where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides

touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,

which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

.

~ Jack Gilbert

with thanks to saturn rising

.