To All The Girls I've Loved Before

I came across this poem by Jack Gilbert this morning, and it seemed to speak to something like what I talked about in yesterday's post.

Cherishing What Isn't

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this

long live, along with the few others.

And the four I may have loved, or stopped short

of loving. I wander through these woods

making songs of you. Some of regret, some

of longing, and a terrible one of death.

I carry the privacy of your bodies

and hearts in me. The shameful ardor

and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds

of happiness and the walled-up childhoods.

I carol loudly of you among trees emptied

of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.

A score of women if you count love both large

and small, real ones that were brief

and those that lasted. Gentle love and some

almost like an animal with its prey.

What is left is what's alive in me. The failing

of your beauty and its remaining.

You are like countries in which my love

took place. Like a bell in the trees

that makes your music in each wind that moves.

A music composed of what you have forgotten.

That will end with my ending.

I love this poem, not least for its echoes of Whitman ("I sing the songs of the glory of you," said Whitman), right up until the line "You are like countries in which my love took place," at which point Gilbert just blithely removes the personhood of 20 or so women. He's a lover; they're locations in which his love plays out. So, love is something a man does in a woman, the way he might be a tourist or a scholar or an archeologist in foreign country. What metaphors didn't make it into the final draft, I wonder? Were they blank pages on which he wrote his life? Prepared canvasses eager to receive his warm, moist paint? Bleah.

 

I'm not too fond of "What is left is what's alive in me," either, because unless I'm mistaken, when a relationship ends in something other than death, two people walk away from it, each of them carrying their piece of it. In Gilbert's vision, the women he's loved have forgotten; only he remembers, so the music that is these women's music ("a bell in the trees that makes your music") is something only he hears and only he carries and it will last only as long as he lives.

 

Bit of an egoist there, Jacky-boy. As if there aren't some 19-ish women out there, for some of whom you were a love, and for some of whom you were someone they "may have loved, or stopped short of loving," some of whom think of you with longing, or with regret, others of whom certainly think of you with indifference, or not at all. Perhaps there is at least one who sings to herself a song of your terrible death. When you died last November, surely some of these women saw the obituary and said, "Jack Gilbert...he was my lover once. I remember him." Surely not everything you claim as yours belonged only to you. I expect you know that by now.

 

 

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