 |
by Jack Gilbert |
|
SEARCHING FOR PITTSBURGH
The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night, between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it. Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world. Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically along three rivers. The authority of them. The gritty alleys where we played every evening were stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky, as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth. Locomotives driving through the cold rain, lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water flowing morning and night throughout a city girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered, sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable. All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace. A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit. Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness. Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged by the heart. Making together a consequence of America. The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again. In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes, amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made. REFUSING HEAVEN The old women in black at early Mass in winter are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes they have seen Christ. They make the kernel of his being and the clarity around it seem meager, as though he needs girders to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses against the Lord. He will not abandon his life. Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills along the banks where he became a young man as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them even though they are gone, to measure against. The silver is worn down to the brass underneath and is the better for it. He will gauge by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain. He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore, a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control. A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt. MEASURING THE TYGER Barrels of chains. Sides of beef stacked in vans. Water buffalo dragging logs of teak in the river mud outside Mandalay. Pantocrater in the Byzantium dome. The mammoth overhead crane bringing slabs of steel through the dingy light and roar to the giant shear that cuts the adamantine three-quarter-inch plates and they flop down. The weight of the mind fractures the girders and piers of the spirit, spilling out the heart’s melt. Incandescent ingots big as cars trundling out of titanic mills, red slag scaling off the brighter metal in the dark. The Monongahela River below, night’s sheen on its belly. Silence except for the machinery clanging deeper in us. You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time running out. Day after day of the everyday. What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge. Newness strutting around as if it were significant. Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry. I want to go back to that time after Michiko’s death when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive. |
||Comments & Awards||Upcoming Author Appearances||