The Spirit and the Soul

The Spirit and the Soul

It should have been the family that lasted.
Should have been my sister
and my peasant mother.
But it was not.
They were the affection,
not the journey.
It could have been my father,
but he died too soon.
Gelmetti and Gregg and Nogami lasted.
It was the newness of me,
and the newness after that,
and newness again.
It was the important love
and the serious lust.
It was Pittsburgh that lasted.
The iron and fog and sooty brick houses.
Not Aunt Mince and Pearl,
but the black-and-white winters
with their girth
and geological length of cold.
Streets ripped apart by ice
and emerging like wounded beasts when
the snow finally left in April.
Freight trains with their steam locomotives
working at night.
Summers the size of crusades.
When I was a boy, I saw downtown
a large camera standing in front
of the William Pitt Hotel
or pointed at Kaufmann’s Department Store.
Usually around midnight,
but the people still going by.
The camera set slow enough
that cars and people left no trace.
The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan
did not last.
But the empty streets of Perugia,
my two bowls of bean soup on Kos,
and Pimpaporn Charionpanith lasted.
The plain nakedness of Anna
in Denmark remains in me forever.
The wet lilacs on Highland Avenue
when I was fourteen.
Carrying Michiko dead in my arms.
It is not about the spirit.
The spirit dances, comes and goes.
But the soul is nailed to us
like lentils and fatty bacon lodged
under the ribs.
What lasted is what the soul ate.
The way a child knows the world
by putting it
part by part into his mouth.
As I tried to gnaw
my way into the Lord,
working to put my heart
against that heart.
Lying in the wheat at night,
letting the rain
after all the dry months have me.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poetry Foundation