Relative Pitch

Relative Pitch


I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
when I heard it, the laughter of children,
so strange in that starkness.
Pushed past the brush and scrub willow
and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls
in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing
and were playing as though they were happy,
as if they did not know any better.
Having no way to measure, I thought,
remembering the man in Virginia who found
a ruined octagonal mansion
and repaired it perfectly. For months
he walked through the grand empty rooms
wondering what they were like.
Until he found a broken chair in the attic
and re-created the colors and scale.
Discovered maybe the kind of life
the house was.
Strangers leave us poems to tell of those
they loved, how the heart broke,
to whisper of the religion
upstairs in the dark,
sometimes in the parlor
amid blazing sunlight,
and under trees with rain coming down
in August on the bare,
unaccustomed bodies.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poetry Foundation