Everywhere and Forever -- Jack Gilbert

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

EVERYWHERE AND FOREVER
by Jack Gilbert

It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
flayed bare by the great sun. All around
are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing
the house was built by the king's telegrapher.
"To write at a distance." He keeps the gate closed
with a massive hasp and chain. The weeds inside
are breast-high around the overgrown rosebushes
and two plum trees. Beyond that, broad stairs
rise to a handsome terrace and the fine house
with its tall windows. He has excavated most
of the courtyard in back. It's there they
spent their perfect days under a diseased
grape arbor and the flowering jasmine. There is
a faint sound of water from the pool over by
the pomegranate tree with its exaggerated fruit.
The basin is no longer choked by the leaves
accumulated in the twelve years of vacancy.
He has come to the right place at the right time.
The blue Aegean is far down, and the slow ships
far out. Doves fly without meaning overhead.
He and the Japanese lady go out the back gate
and up the stream stone by stone, bushes on each side
heavy with moths. They come out under big plane trees.
There is a dirt path from there to a nunnery.
She says goodbye and he starts down to the village
at the bottom where he will get their food for a week.
The sky is vast overhead. Neither of them knows
she is dying. He thinks of their eleven years together.
Realizes they used up all that particular time
everywhere in the cosmos, and forever

For Jane | Bukowski

[wanton-wonton.livejournal.com]

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.