Startling Clarity

“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.”
~ Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All: Poems

“And,” she said, “you must talk no more
about ecstasy. It is a loneliness.”
The woman wandered about picking up
her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”
the man said. “We tell lies,” she said,
brushing her wonderful hair, naked except
for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”
“You were helpless with joy,” he said,
“moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said,
“we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.
The heart lies to itself because it must.”
~ Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven

"I once dreamed that I’d live to be sixty. In those days that was how old you could live to be. But many of my ancestors lived to a hundred. I have this mechanism, this body, which has been so kind to me. I’ve never been in a hospital, except once—I fell. I was supposed to die. I fell head down from ninety feet. When I didn’t die right away, they let me go home. I insisted because it was Christmas. If I was going to die, I wanted to die under the Christmas tree with Linda. I still didn’t die. But I couldn’t support my own torso because I’d broken my spine and chest. Linda and I wanted to go to Europe, so I had them build something that was like an exoskeleton. After saying goodbye to the doctors, I walked toward the door with Linda and when I got halfway there the doctor in charge said, Oh, one thing. If you feel a little bit of tingling in your fingers, that will mean that the paralysis has started. That never happened. So I’ve been blessed.

I was with Linda and her father didn’t approve at all. I mean, he was resentful that I was bedding his daughter without any official rights. On Christmas Day we went up on his mountain to find a tree that would suit Linda. We were walking along and he was behaving himself. We kept walking until we came to these trees. He was crazy about nature. He said, You know, if you cut off the top of that tree—if you could cut just the top—the tree wouldn’t die, and it would make it a more attractive tree without that spindly, weak top.

Being the bad guy with his lovely daughter, I immediately took the rope and saw and started climbing. I didn’t know anything about it. I knew a lot about apple trees because I’d spent time in an orchard. But not a forest. I was way up there. I climbed to the top, but I’m no fool—I tied myself to the trunk. I thought I would tug on the treetop until it snapped, except in the middle of doing this there was a big gust of wind that snapped the thing, and it fell on me and was pushing me down. I was all right at first because I had tied myself in, except after a while—they couldn’t get to me quickly enough—my thighs started to give way. I was heroic about it, but my thighs gave way, and the rope too. I plummeted down, shearing off the branches. I was going so fast that the speed just butchered the tree. Luckily I landed on dirt."

Much of Jack Gilbert's work is about his relationships with women. While in Italy, he met Gianna Gelmetti, a romantic partner who appears frequently in his work. The relationship ended after a year. Gilbert was a close friend of the poet Linda Gregg, who he met when she was nineteen and his student in San Francisco, and with whom he was in a relationship for six years. Of the poet, Gregg once said, "All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake—that the trees in bloom were almond trees—and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench." He was also in a significant long-term relationship with the poet Laura Ulewicz during the late fifties and early sixties in San Francisco. Ulewicz was a great influence on his early work, in fact much of his characteristic style for which he later became known came directly from her, and his first book was dedicated to her. Gilbert also was in a relationship with Michiko Nogami, another former student and a Japanese language instructor 21 years his junior, about whom he wrote many of his poems. Nogami died of cancer at the age of 36. Gilbert died on November 13, 2012 in Berkeley, California. He was 87. On April 15, 2013 it was announced that Gilbert's Collected Poems was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Pulitzer jury's citation read:

“ a half century of poems reflecting a creative author’s commitment to living fully and honestly and to producing straightforward work that illuminates everyday experience with startling clarity."

Photos ~ Jack Gilbert & Linda Gregg, in the 1960s Hanging out on the Greek Islands writing poetry and living the simple life