anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
I am hungry for what I am becoming.
-Jack Gilbert, excerpt from the poem, “Bring in the Gods”
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough that I embarrass myself working so hard to get it right even a little, and that little grudging and awkward. But it’s afterwards I resent, when the sweet sure should hold me like a trout in the bright summer stream. There should be at least briefly access to your glamour and tenderness. But there’s always this same old dissatisfaction instead.
-Jack Gilbert, “Doing Poetry”
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
memoryslandscape-deactivated202
Poetry registers / feelings, delights and passions, but the best searches / out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Jack Gilbert, from “Beyond Pleasure,” Refusing Heaven: Poems
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
memoryslandscape-deactivated202
The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.
Jack Gilbert, from “A Walk Blossoming,” Refusing Heaven: Poems
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
memoryslandscape-deactivated202
He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back / to what he knew then.
Jack Gilbert, from “Beyond Pleasure,” Refusing Heaven: Poems
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
metaphorformetaphor
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot.
Jack Gilbert, from “Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina,” Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
metaphorformetaphor
That is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere […]
The pregnant heart
is driven to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world.
Jack Gilbert, from “Trouble,” Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
metaphorformetaphor
“Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving or an emptying out? If the heart persists in waiting, does it begin to lessen?”
— Jack Gilbert, opening lines to “The Answer” from The Dance Most of All: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?”
Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.
Jack Gilbert, from “The Lost Hotels of Paris,” Refusing Heaven (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
apoetreflects
Is there a happiness
later on that is neither fierce nor reasonable?
A time when the heart is fresh again, and a time
after that when the heart is ripe?
Jack Gilbert, from “Beyond Beginnings,” The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
apoetreflects
… the lost combs year
after year grow heavier with honey.
And the sweetness has more and more
acutely the taste of that wildness.
Jack Gilbert, closing lines to “Older Women,” from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
apoetreflects
The train’s stopping wakes me.
Weeds in the gully are white
with the year’s first snow.
A lighted train goes
slowly past absolutely empty …
I feel around in myself
to see if I mind. Maybe
I am lonely. It is hard
to know. It could be
hidden in familiarity
Jack Gilbert, "Suddenly Adult," from The Dance Most of All: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
Jack Gilbert (via the-final-sentence)