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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.

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Other works by Jack Gilbert...
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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…
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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.
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,…
Rain

Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray And the browns gone gray And yellow
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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…
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
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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
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
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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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
Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark… Our dream wrestles in the castle o… But there’s music in us. Hope is… but the angel flies up again takin… The summer mornings begin inch by…



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