Collected Poems
Authors: Jack Gilbert
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Poems in this collection originally appeared in the following works:
Views of Jeopardy,
copyright © 1962 by Yale University Press (Yale University Press, 1962);
Monolithos,
copyright © 1963, 1965, 1966, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982);
The Great Fires,
copyright © 1994 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994);
Refusing Heaven,
copyright © 2005 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); and
The Dance Most of All,
copyright © 2009 by Jack Gilbert (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).
Poems collected here for the first time were originally published in the following publications:
The Kenyon Review:
“Secrets of Poetry”;
The New Republic:
“Spring”;
The New Yorker:
“Convalescing.”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilbert, Jack, [date]
[Poems, Selections]
Collected poems / by Jack Gilbert.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96074-0
I. Title.
PS3557.I34217A6 2012
811’.54—dc23
2011025743
Cover image:
Jack, 1960,
woodcut by
Gianna Gelmetti (1937–2010)
Cover design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1_r1
For Gianna Gelmetti, Michiko Nogami, and Linda Gregg
Perspective He Would Mutter Going to Bed
It May Be No One Should Be Opened
House on the California Mountain
Myself Considered as the Monster in the Foreground
In Perugino We Have Sometimes Seen Our Country
A Poem for the Fin Du Monde Man
Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell
Don Giovanni on His Way to Hell (II)
The Night Comes Every Day to My Window
The First Morning of the World on Long Island
I’ll Try to Explain About the Fear
The Bay Bridge from Potrero Hill
On Growing Old in San Francisco
Without Watteau, Without Burckhardt, Oklahoma
It Is Clear Why the Angels Come No More
The Whiteness, the Sound, and Alcibiades
A Bird Sings to Establish Frontiers
All the Way from There to Here
That Tenor of Which the Night Birds Are a Vehicle
Walking Home Across the Island
They Call It Attempted Suicide
Burning and Fathering: Accounts of My Country
The Rainy Forests of Northern California
They Will Put My Body into the Ground
The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon
A Description of Happiness in København
Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan
Singing in My Difficult Mountains
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
To See If Something Comes Next
Trying to Have Something Left Over
Prospero Dreams of Arnaut Daniel Inventing Love in the Twelfth Century
The Container for the Thing Contained
The Lord Sits with Me Out in Front
Music Is the Memory of What Never Happened
Foraging for Wood on the Mountain
Put Her in the Fields for Kindness
By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.
Happening Apart from What’s Happening Around It
Meditation Eleven: Reading Blake Again
How Much of That Is Left in Me?