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Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert

In Dispraise of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

#Americans

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Other works by Jack Gilbert...
Portrait Number Five: Against a New York Summer

I’d walk her home after work buying roses and talking of Bechst… She was full of soul. Her small room was gorged with hea… and there were no windows.
Recovering Amid the Farms

Every morning the sad girl brings… and two lambs laggardly to the top… past my stone hut and onto the mou… She turned twelve last year and it… for the father to take her out of…
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

How astonishing it is that languag… and frightening that it does not q… God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we… Get it wrong. We say bread and it… to which nation. French has no wor…
 2
Separation, by Edvard Munch
Divorce

Woke up suddenly thinking I heard… Rushed through the dark house. Stopped, remembering. Stood looki… out at the bright moonlight on con…
 1
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South

In the small towns along the river nothing happens day after long day… Summer weeks stalled forever, and long marriages always the same… Lives with only emergencies, birth…
Searching for Pittsburgh

The fox pushes softly, blindly thr… between the liver and the stomach.… and hesitates. Considers and then… Trying to escape the mildness of o… Goes deeper, searching for what re…
 1
A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter ever… are not starving someplace, they a… somewhere else. With flies in thei… But we enjoy our lives because tha… Otherwise the mornings before summ…
 2
Spring

I call it exile, or being relegate… I call it the provinces. And all the time it is my heart. My imperfect heart which prefers this distance from people. Prefers
Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dism… the heart knows. By redefining the… we find a morning that comes just… We can break through marriage into… By insisting on love we spoil it,…
Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also… It’s the same when love comes to a… or the marriage fails and people s… they knew it was a mistake, that e… said it would never work. That she…
 1
The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things. Desire and excitement are nothing… It is not the body that finds love… What leads us there is the body. What is not love provokes it.
 1
Pewter

Thrushes flying over the lake. Ni… Yes, my King. Paris hungry and le… America falling into history. Yes… along the Seine when I was always…
The Abnormal Is Not Courage

The Poles rode out from Warsaw ag… Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in… A magnitude of beauty that allows… And yet this poem would lessen tha… The bravery. Say it’s not courage…
The Mistake

There is always the harrowing by m… the strafing by age, he thinks. Al… Sorrows come like epidemics. But… in the difficult way adults want t… It is worth having the heart broke…
Going There

Of course it was a disaster. The unbearable, dearest secret has always been a disaster. The danger when we try to leave. Going over and over afterward
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