Alone BY JACK GILBERT I never thought Michiko would come back after she died. But if she did, I knew it would be as a lady in a long white dress. It is strange that she has returned as somebody's dalmatian. I meet the man walking her on a leash almost every week. He says good morning and I stoop down to calm her. He said once that she was never like that with other people. Sometimes she is tethered on their lawn when I go by. If nobody is around, I sit on the grass. When she finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper in her soft ears. She cares nothing about the mystery. She likes it best when I touch her head and tell her small things about my days and our friends. That makes her happy the way it always did. Jack Gilbert, "Alone" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Source: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)
I was 39 when my father died. That midlife crisis spurred me to abandon the security of the teaching career, that I’d begun when my first child was born, to pursue the ever-present passionate-distraction of scribbling my thoughts and thinking about that, them, then reading more, and thinking and scribbling about that, too, and so on and so on till now.
In 1994 I decided to gather my samples of poetry and fiction and apply to the University of Montana's Creative Writing Program. I wasn't thinking about money (obviously) and I am (still!) lucky enough to be married to someone who loves me, so she grabbed my hand and we jumped off a financial cliff together in the name of living a life of creative expression, a life led more by the heart than the head. We had no idea how this would translate itself into money or help take care of our kids, but we were desperate to make the most of being alive and had faith the future would somehow work out. I guess we knew we could always go back to working for money (which is of course what we did do).
I applied for the next fall, and when I hadn't heard anything by late spring of '95, I called UM and inquired about the status of my application. They told me my name wasn't on the list of those accepted into the program but that my application was good for two years if I wanted to resubmit next year and freshen up my writing samples. A bit crestfallen, I knew I needed to turn to the task of supporting my family until I could apply again.
So, the saga from '95 to '96 is a long-winded and action packed tale for another time, a terrifying adventure in business and bankruptcy that taught us some valuable lessons about ourselves. It also took us to rock bottom financially. Still, my heart-mind was focused on the fleeting hope that my updated writing samples for the re-submission of my application would put me where I wanted to be. So in the early spring of '96 I went to the Creative Writing Department to update my file with some new writing samples. The English department secretary couldn’t find my application file in the unaccepted drawer. And after searching all the possible locations it might be and coming up empty, she decided to check the accepted cabinet drawer. Lo nd behold, there it was. As it turned out, I was accepted the year before but the address they sent the letter to was six years out of date. Since I didn't respond to their letter inviting me to the program, they assumed I wasn't interested. Some time after I had previously spoken to them about my application and was informed I hadn’t made it, a student whom they had accepted, decided to go to another school, which moved me up onto the accepted list. Sigh. But then if I’d gotten the letter and gone to grad school that year, I would have missed out on the invaluable experience of bankruptcy.
I had no illusions that a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing would equate into money for me. The main reason being that I had no interest in leaving Montana, and I knew how limited the jobs were in this small state. I wanted to go and study just to work on the craft of writing for two years and commune with those teachers and fellow students who also loved it. To my great surprise the visiting Hugo writing teacher for the winter/spring semester of my first year was going to be Jack Gilbert.
Jack won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1962, making him the hottest young poet in America. Since that prize, he'd only published one other collection in thirty years until 1995 when The Great Fires appeared. He was a bit of a renegade who hadn't played the game, disappearing to Europe and falling into obscurity. In that time he had two significant relationships with women. One with the poet Linda Gregg that lasted many years, and then a marriage to Michiko Nagomi of eleven that ended with her death in 1982 in her thirties. Much of Jack's poetry was inspired by these two women.
Maybe it was because I was older or because I felt like an outsider in academia. Jack was definitely an outsider at the university. He was a liver of life, a writer of poems, and he didn’t believe one could become a poet by going to college. Jack and I became friends. We'd get together outside of the workshops to talk poetry and drink coffee, and I'd often give him a ride after class or a lift if he needed to go somewhere he couldn't walk. I consider him a major mentor and inspiration. I wrote this poem for him upon hearing the news of his death in 2012.
Ablaze Jack, after reading Jack Spicer recently, I remembered how you talked about him as some prophet of magical writing, and I have sensed the wraiths shadowing your clear-eyed poems, kneeling silent beside a mattress on an earthen floor or staring in one pane of a small kitchen window overlooking a bare counter, your body- minded pen pulling us across and in- to some landscape we scour like spiritual sponges, ghosts dripping with the fullness of our deep immersion into your bucket, your cauldron, this vessel of inky breath we long to enter again and again, simple zen-like moments seen from above or outside and between our hands—visions as arresting as the texture of our skin, the patterns of whorls, that curl and dexterity of our fingers, the awareness that we too are trapped in a poem, this flesh carriage of blood and air, where we peek out at the marvels surrounding us every time the shades go up and the radios turn on, when we draw the water, cut the apples, or smell last night’s love and garlic as we straddle the commode. Yes, Jack, it’s come to this: my greatest fire is still not poetry, but each day the blaze grows, threatening to consume me, raging not with Biblical fury, but with the subtle persistence of breathing, of wind in leaves. Jack, I’ve finally fallen under that spell, obsession, magic too old for romance, too young to tell anyone anything conjured up as wisdom or advice, so I will slice the fruit, heat the coffee, and stand too long in a hot shower, curtains pulled, eyes closed, wafting in her laughter and hair—coddled between her thighs—forty years of steamy bed vapors. Vow to let each day be new, I tell myself—the silence is already here. —for Jack Gilbert & Pam Mark Gibbons, 2017, The Imitation Blues
Many times Jack would ask a group of young poets to rank what was most important in their lives. He understood when I chose my family, but it wasn't something that got in the way of poetry for him. I joked that poetry came in third in my life. He also couldn't comprehend that I had been with the same woman for all my life. He told me I had no conception of what romantic love was because I had been married since I was an adolescent. He had a life that included many women and many romantic relationships, and he had two committed relationships, so he knew both experiences. I couldn't argue what I didn't know. Yet I did point out that as much as he knew, he did not know what it was like to fall in love with a young woman and remain with her and grow into the maturity of a late life marriage. He smiled but didn't buy any of it. He held to his “views (of jeopardy)” as all poets must do.
I found Jack's address in a drawer last week which reminded me of visiting with him, and I recalled the story he told a friend and me about “aging skin,” his aging skin, all skin, our skins, yours. But who thinks about things like that? Besides poets and the aging? He was 72, a couple years older than I am now, which gives me pause in the way that all things time-related do at this stage of life and beyond. I have a better sense now of the man I knew back then because I have aged into him. It’s one hell of a trip this life walk. What a treat to experience any of it, but to have done 68 or 86 or any number beyond those years is sweet backstroking in Carver’s “gravy” boat, realizing whatever we get is a treat and a gift before we move on beyond this plane.
Skin I remember Jack Gilbert talking about skin the texture and resilience of aging skin pinching skin on the back of his hand we watched the flesh ridge slowly recede back to the flat plain of weathered wrinkled skin once again he'd grabbed our attention hydration was the case he made for life death waits for us to dry so I draw a glass of water at the sink after watching my squeezed skin stand awhile odd I think at first that Jack comes to mind staring at my withered skin him gone now over a decade but last week I found his address in a drawer neither poetry nor hydration are concerns for him now having dried to dust leaving us the ashes of his Great Fires along with sage advice to drink more water if we want to live longer without it we disappear mark gibbons
Anyway, that's all I've got for today's reflection. My suggestion? Read (more) Jack Gilbert. Slainte!
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