Cherishing What Isn't by Jack Gilbert
- marychristinedelea
- Oct 1
- 3 min read
Cherishing What Isn't
by Jack Gilbert
Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this
long life, along with the few others.
And the four I may have loved, or stopped short
of loving. I wander through these woods
making songs of you. Some of regret, some
of longing, and a terrible one of death.
I carry the privacy of your bodies
and hearts in me. The shameful ardor
and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds
of happiness and the walled-up childhoods
I carol loudly of you among trees emptied
of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.
A score of women if you count love both large
and small, real ones that were brief
and those that lasted. Gentle love and some
almost like an animal with its prey.
What is left is what's alive in me. The failing
of your beauty and its remaining.
You are like countries in which my love
took place. Like a bell in the trees
that makes your music in each wind that moves.
A music composed of what you have forgotten.
That will end with my ending.
I hope this does not come off as cruel, because I do not mean it that way at all, but Jack Gilbert is the king of broken heart poems. This one, published in his 2010 book The Dance Most of All (Alfred A Knopf), makes reference to many loves. He called himself a "serious romantic."
This poem certainly fits with our current obsession with gratitude (not that we should not be grateful, but let's chill out a bit). The speaker recounts his past loves--a score of women, or 20. Three were major loves, four were ones he "may have loved." The other 13, we can assume, were more passing fancies.
For me, what makes this poem is both the honesty and the fact that this is also, in a small way, a love poem about his own love poems about these women (" I wander through these woods making songs of you").
He says:
I carry the privacy of your bodies
and hearts in me.
Had he said "the memory" of, rather than "the privacy," so much poignancy would be gone. We all have memories, but here the speaker is carrying the privacy, which seems immensly respectful and intimate. And he is not just speaking of the physical, but the women's hearts, their secrets, and their takes from their childhoods.
But of course there is also the sexual component: "The shameful ardor and the shameless intimacy" and later, "Gentle love and some almost like an animal with its prey."
Much of the poem consists of this AND this--it is a subtle form that makes this list poem less of a straight list. At the end of the poem, he foregoes the "and" but it is there.
You are like countries in which my love
took place. Like a bell in the trees
that makes your music in each wind that moves.
An "and" could fit nicely between the two sentences. I like that this bell in the trees goes back to the woods mentioned earlier, but I am in love with "You are like countries in which my love took place." Looking back on our past loves is like that, isn't it? Those people are all these different places we visited.
The end of the speaker will mean the end of these poems/songs, the end of what he carries inside of him about all of them, and his affection for each woman. There is a sadness there, but I also read this poem as one in which the speaker is grateful to have known all of these women, including the one whose death did him in. (I have a few links below where you can read about Gilbert's personal life--it includes other poets!)
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