Gift Horses

Gift Horses


He lives in the barrens,
in dying neighborhoods
and negligible countries.
None with an address.
But still the Devil finds him.
Kills the wife
or spoils the marriage.
Publishes each place and makes it popular,
makes it better, makes it unusable.
Brings news of friends, all defeated,
most sick or sad without reasons.
Shows him photographs
of the beautiful women in old movies
whose luminous faces sixteen feet tall
looked out at the boy in the dark
where he grew his heart.
Brings pictures of what they look like now.
Says how lively they are,
and brave despite their age.
Taking away everything.
For the Devil is commissioned to harm,
to keelhaul us with loss, with knowledge
of how all things splendid
are disfigured by small and small.
Yet he allows us to eat roast goat
on the mountain above Parakia.
Lets us stumble for the first time,
unprepared, onto the buildings
of Palladio in moonlight.
Maybe because he is not good at his job.
I believe he loves us against his will.
Because of the women and how the men
struggle to hear inside them.
Because we construe something important
from trees and locomotives,
smell weeds on a hot July afternoon
and are augmented.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poetry Foundation