The Mistake

The Mistake

There is always the harrowing by mortality,
the strafing by age, he thinks.
Always defeats.
Sorrows come like epidemics.
But we are alive in the difficult way
adults want to be alive.
It is worth having the heart broken,
a blessing to hurt for eighteen years
because a woman is dead.
He thinks of long before that,
the summer he was with Gianna
and her sister in Apulia.
Having outwitted the General,
their father, and driven south
to the estate of the Contessa.
Like an opera.
The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.
Houses of the peasants burrowed
into the walls of the compound.
A butler with white gloves
serving chicken in aspic.
The pretty maid in her uniform
bringing his breakfast each morning
on a silver tray:
toast both light and dark,
hot chocolate and tea both.
A world like Tosca.
A feudal world crushed under
the weight of passion without feeling.
Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.
The young man wild
with romance and appetite.
Wondering whether he would ruin her
by mistake.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poem-A-Day