Clarity
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out?
If
the heart persists in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If
we are always good does God lose track of us? Jack Gilbert, The Answer
If we are always good, does God
lose track
of us? What comfort is there in hoping now-
the heart nearer the end than the
beginning?
You lie beside me doubting, numbering
fears
the way I number blessings. You wake
in the night and feel something
important
standing there. Sleep lost to you, you rise
to stare at your gray reflection
under the bathroom light.
There is your clarity, your
promise, as long as the eyes
open and the heart beats. There is your revelation.
The silence in you
is absolute and
inconvenient. I cannot enter into it
with you. I kiss you and want to tell you
in a meaningful way: I remember
a morning at the beach when I was
a girl.
It was so early it was both dawn
and night.
The wind pulled at my hair and
stirred the grasses
where I sat on the white sand
dune.
My family was far down the
shore.
Near me, a heron rose blue-gray
against the palest
part of the sky. The music of the waves
played for me alone, and I knew that it
kept playing when I was gone.
This is a Response poem to Jack Gilbert's The Answer. Here is Mr. Gilbert's poem:
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out? If the heart persists
in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If we are always good does God lose track
of us? When I wake at night, there is
something important there. Like the humming
of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
in the slums. There is silence in me,
absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
by the day I walked through the Greek village
where everyone was asleep and somebody began
playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
the upper floor of a plain white stone house.
