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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.

#AmericanWriters

Other works by Jack Gilbert...
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
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
 3
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
In Umbria

Once upon a time I was sitting ou… watching twilight in Umbria when a… out of the bakery with the bread h… She did not know what to do. Alre… by being thirteen and just that su…
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
Rain

Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray And the browns gone gray And yellow
 1
A Description of Happiness in Kobenhavn

All this windless day snow fell into the King’s Garden where I walked, perfecting and gro… abandoning one by one everybody: randomly in love with the paradise
 3
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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
 1
 2
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…
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…
Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

There was no water at my grandfath… when I was a kid and would go for… with two zinc buckets. Down the pa… past the cow by the foundation whe… the fine people’s house was before



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