Searching for Pittsburgh

Searching For Pittsburgh

The fox pushes softly,
blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach.
Comes to the heart
and hesitates.
Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness
of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains
of Pittsburgh in me.
The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers.
The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played
every evening were stained pink
by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father
were still fashioning the Earth.
Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength.
Massive water flowing morning and night
throughout a city girded with ninety bridges.
Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic,
unquenchable.
All grip and flood,
mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood.
Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh.
Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us
as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness,
our minds forged by the heart.
Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh
again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont.
On Greek islands
with their fields of stone.
In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness.
Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds
and the sound of water.
In this happy place my serious heart has made.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on American Poems