“Looking at Pittsburgh From Paris”
“‘There be monsters,’ they warn in the blank spaces of the old maps. But the real danger is the ocean's insufficiency, the senseless repetition throughout the empty waters. Calm & storms & calm again”
“Looking at Pittsburgh From Paris”
“‘There be monsters,’ they warn in the blank spaces of the old maps. But the real danger is the ocean's insufficiency, the senseless repetition throughout the empty waters. Calm & storms & calm again”
GOING HOME
Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.It’s the same when love comes to an end,or the marriage fails and people saythey knew it was a mistake, that everybodysaid it would never work. That she wasold enough to know better. But anythingworth doing is worth doing badly.Like being there by that summer oceanon the other side of...
HAUNTED IMPORTANTLY
“It was not the bell he was trying to find, but the angel lost in our bodies. The music that thinking is.
He wanted to know what he heard, not to get closer.”
A spicy #poem for Tuesday. Jack Gilbert is dear to my heart. He was born in Pittsburgh, but left. I included a poem of his in a letter to my sister after she passed away— I displayed it at the funeral home. This is another poem “A Fact”
“The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand.” #JackGilbert
This is the last poem in Jack Gilbert's "Collected Poems" and it is fitting for his end. But what is notable is that this poem was written originally under a pseudonym and was published in a book titled Torches at Noon s...