Measuring the Tyger

Measuring the Tyger

Barrels of chains.
Sides of beef stacked in vans.
Water buffalo dragging logs of teak
in the river mud outside Mandalay.
Pantocrater in the Byzantium dome.
The mammoth overhead crane bringing
slabs of steel through the dingy light
and roar to the giant shear that cuts
the adamantine three-quarter-inch plates
and they flop down.
The weight of the mind fractures
the girders and piers of the spirit,
spilling out the heart’s melt.
Incandescent ingots big as cars
trundling out of titanic mills,
red slag scaling off
the brighter metal in the dark.
The Monongahela River below,
night’s sheen on its belly.
Silence except for the machinery
clanging deeper in us.
You will love again, people say.
Give it time.
Me with time running out.
Day after day of the everyday.
What they call real life,
made of eighth-inch gauge.
Newness strutting around
as if it were significant.
Irony, neatness and rhyme
pretending to be poetry.
I want to go back to that time
after Michiko’s death when I cried
every day among the trees.
To the real.
To the magnitude of pain,
of being that much alive.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poetry Foundation