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Reading Jack Gilbert’s
poems again by the sea,
this time at Longboat Key
on holiday with my wife.
We lay in the shade of
a blue umbrella, so dazed
with heat we can barely breathe.

The Gulf beach so white,
an sheet ironed by the sun.
Far from that stormy beach
on the Atlantic three years ago
where I tried to get well
in a raging surge.

Yet today as then I read
Jack Gilbert’s poems and find
the balm I need, his lines
washing me in waves
of indolent truth.

How I’ve searched for words
like his to say to water.

He looked down over
the sleepy Aegean
and saw an ocean inside
the making of his life.

So much must have seemed
the same:  glitters spread
across the aching blue,
breezes clean and
supple as gauze.

In so few words he found
the exact sense of his
day at the ocean,

concealing how much
time and craft and courage
it takes to write on water.

Erasing all that is not heart
from seascape and day.

Today his poems
remind me that
the sea is only a page
impatient to turn

and the sun a
bronze shield
against all the things
we learn or else.

Unscroll the heart
in the gull slowly
crossing the scree.

Breathe the gently
passing day like a prayer
or the memory of grace.

Now grasp the pen lightly
and curve words into surf.

1998

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Jack Gilbert

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Note

There’s nothing like reading poems by the aural swash of the sea. I love reading Jack Gilbert there, as well as Whitman and Wordsworth, David St. John and Mary Oliver.  I once walked Melbourne beach reading Ginsberg’s “Howl” out loud, pacing his meters to the soft rollers that plashed to my feet. (How a mad urban manifesto could blend so perfectly with a softly sursurrant sea is beyond me, but they matched seamlessly. A.R. Ammons’ poems are wonderful with water bones to support them. Keats’s epitaph was “His name was writ on water,” and surely the poetic voice owes its depth and strength to the great mothersea.  It probably goes back to when I was three years old at Jacksonville Beach, sitting on the sand listening to my mother’s voice blend with the surf. My ears become shells of that, forever resonant with the old salt communion.

A Jack Gilbert poem from the collection (The Great Fires, 1995) I was reading at the time I wrote this poem:

THE MILK OF PARADISE

Jack Gilbert

On the beach below Spelunga everyone is
speaking Italian, lazily paradisal in the heat.
He tries to make something of it, as though
something were going on. As though there were
something to be found in the obvious nakedness
of breasts. He complicates what is easily true,
hunting it down. It matters disproportionately
to him to see the ocean suddenly as he turns over.
He watches the afternoon as though it had
a secret. For years he will be considering
the two women nearby who decide to get lunch
at the restaurant back by the cliff. The taller
one picks up her top and tries to get
into it as they start out. But it tangles,
and she gives it indolently to the prettier one,
who puts it on as they walk away carelessly
into the garnishing Mediterranean light.

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Submitted for Real Toads Kenia Wednesday Challenge.