Happening apart from what's happening around it - Jack Gilbert

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Happening apart from what's happening around it                              
                                                       by Jack Gilbert

There is a vividness to eleven years of love
because it is over. A clarity of Greece now
because I live in Manhattan or New England.
If what is happening is part of what's going on
around what's occurring, it is impossible
to know what truly is happening. If love is
part of the passion, part of the fine food
or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not
clear what love is. When I was walking
in the mountains with the Japanese man and began
to hear the water, he said, "What is the sound
of the waterfall?" "Silence," he finally told me.
The stillness I did not notice until the sound
of water falling made apparent the silence I had
been hearing long before. I ask myself what
is the sound of women? What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,
the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still
in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper
down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,
where something very far away in that body
is becoming something we don't have a name for.

                -- from Refusing Heaven (Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry)
 

+ The poem is, as is typical of Gilbert, a retrospective on the nature of love. It must've been an important poem in Gilbert's repertoire because this is one of the few poems where love isn't just the underlying motif, it is the subject and the focus of the piece as well. One of those poems that actually make you sit back and think about love as a topic of philosophy and not a memory.  

Comments

[zxinkle.livejournal.com]

thank you for posting, this was absolutely lovely.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

You are welcome. Gilbert is a poet everyone _needs_ to read.

./w

[inoubliable1.livejournal.com]

Gilbert is always so beautiful.

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

I think I sort of really love everything I've seen posted by him here.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

I think Gilbert has not written a single poem that is ordinary.

./w

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

You are most welcome. Gilbert is my weekend messiah.

./w

[writtenbyhand.livejournal.com]

This is delicious. Thank you.
(And those line breaks are sheer genius.)

[moireach.livejournal.com]

I'm really psyched for his new book.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

He has a new book coming out?!! Where did you hear about this? Also, do you know how to get his older books in the market? All of them seem to be 200-300$s worth now -- probably all collector's editions!

./w

[moireach.livejournal.com]

It was in last week's New Yorker, along with one of the new poems. It's due out in April: http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307270764

I know it's possible to find his older books for less than that, since I know someone who got them as gifts, but I'd imagine it involves a lot of effort.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! I am going to open up a vintage the day I get this in the mail. Thank you!

./w