The Dance Most of All

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In this “pithy and poignant” (Booklist) late-in-life collection, the award-winning Jack Gilbert gives us characteristically bold and nuanced poems as he revisits the passions of a lifetime—the women, the places, and the mysterious and lonely offices of poetry itself.“These poems are deeply elegiac, looking back over a long life lived in the various modes one comes to associate with Gilbert: desire, love, longing, and happiness . . . For Gilbert, these poems suggest a satisfaction and peace with all he has done. For the rest of us, we may take Gilbert’s final work as a guide.” —The Oregonian

“The best poems here are valuable bulletins from a distant, private war fought over resources for affirmation, in which the most precious weapon is the capacity to ‘say grace over / almost everything.’” —PoetryJack Gilbert is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Gilbert lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.THE SPELL CAST OVERIn the old days we could see nakedness onlyin the burlesque houses. In the lavishtheaters left over from vaudeville,ruined in the Great Depression. What had beengrand gestures of huge chandeliersand mythic heroes courting the goddesson the ceiling. Now the chandeliers were grimyand the ceilings hanging in tatters. It waslike the Russian aristocrats fleeingthe Revolution. Ending up as taxi driversin Paris dressed in their worn-out elegance.It was like that in the Pittsburgh of my days.Old men of shabby clothes in the emptyseats at the Roxy Theater dreamingof the sumptuous headlinersslowly discarding layers of theirlavish gowns. Baring the secretbeauty to the men of their season.The old men came from their one room(with its single, forbidden gas range)to watch the strippers.To remember what usedto be. Like the gray-haired men of Iliumwho waited each morning for Helento cross over to the temple in her light raiment.The waning men longed to escape from the spellcast over them by time.To escape the imprisonedlonging.To insist on dispensation.To seetheir young hearts just one more time.Those famous women like honeycombs.Women movingto the old music again. That former grace of flesh.The sheen of them in the sunlight, to watchthem walking by the sea.SOUTHIn the small towns along the rivernothing happens day after long day.Summer weeks stalled forever,and long marriages always the same.Lives with only emergencies, births,and fishing for excitement. Then a shipcomes out of the mist. Or comes aroundthe bend carefully one morningin the rain, past the pines and shrubs.Arrives on a hot fragrant night,grandly, all lit up. Gone two dayslater, leaving fury in its wake.For Susan Crosby Lawrence AndersonCHERISHING WHAT ISN’TAh, you three women whom I have loved in thislong life, along with the few others.And the four I may have loved, or stopped shortof loving. I wander through these woodsmaking songs of you. Some of regret, someof longing, and a terrible one of death.I carry the privacy of your bodiesand hearts in me. The shameful ardorand the shameless intimacy, the secret kindsof happiness and the walled-up childhoods.I carol loudly of you among trees emptiedof winter and rejoice quietly in summer.A score of women if you count love both largeand small, real ones that were briefand those that lasted. Gentle love and somealmost like an animal with its prey.What is left is what’s alive in me. The failingof your beauty and its remaining.You are like countries in which my lovetook place. Like a bell in the treesthat makes your music in each wind that moves.A music composed of what you have forgotten.That will end with my ending.US

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