Clarity, The Answer

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.