After Love
He is watching the music
with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees,
the heart below, step by step.
The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet,
like the man remembering and hoping.
It is a thing in us, mostly unnoticed.
There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning.
The pain going this way and that.
Never again.
Never bodied again.
Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth.
Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had.
And the man knowing all of him
will come to the end.
Jack Gilbert
Posted over on The New Yorker
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