In the aftermath of a dream, wading through the rubble, half-light caught in the scraps of the morning, the eye discerns a broken shell, a conch caught mid thrust, where sound has gone into hiding. What must it mean, this ocean dust thrown up against the shore of the morning, with edges translucent as nail. It is more than a beautiful mistake, more than time hollowed into metaphor. It is not search, but a message about the destination.
There is certainty in this vision. Its broken fingers point to something that cannot really be known even if the body was all eyes. But what is to know a thing, to yearn, to rip through the soft hide of afersleep slowly souring into something older, something quieter.
Is all creation simply a surge from the broken to the whole, the incomplete to the overdone? Does the moment live in the shell or the carapace, the flesh or its taste?
It is easier, sometimes, to describe a dream in retrospect, than to fall headlong into its mirrored surface and then rise. again. easier to wax prescient, once you have seen a thing. But then did you really know it? Have you known love because you have fallen once? or risen? Is it enough to learn, and then unlearn, and then to teach what you have unlearnt, to stack knowledge before wide-eyed listeners, knowing well that there is no map to enlightenment?
What I have learnt from Jack Gilbert, is that there is nothing new, nothing old. There is no real epiphany, only more checkpoints in the hungry terrain of the self.
Every day, a new silence sits before us, waiting for its moment.
I love Jack Gilbert, and can never get enough of his words. You can read more of his work in the Poetly archives. Here are a few - I Imagine the Gods, Music is in the piano…, Michiko Dead, Longing.
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