A girl is a girl until she is a woman,
Which is more how she
Enters a room
Than lust
We met so many times I forgot
To forget your name
And I think you forgot to
to fake the same
we parted in July
unable to speak fully
as explosions colored the sky
-------------------------------------------
you remain despite all this;
Which is strange
Because ‘all this’ is stretching
into open air
and cannot be contained
By the length of your hair
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Jack Gilbert 1925-2012 RIP
The greater purpose
of life involves tossing things into the air, watching them rise into space
then letting them spin uncontrollably until they strike the ground. To set
something into motion and witness it react completely out of your control. To
both make motion and be completely unable to stop it.
