Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

Jack Gilbert

1925 –

2012

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.

From The Dance Most of All by Jack Gilbert. Copyright © 2009 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her. The summer mornings begin inch by inch while we sleep, and walk with us later as long-legged beauty through the dirty streets. It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing. We know the horses are there in the dark meadow because we can smell them, can hear them breathing.

In the small towns along the river nothing happens day after long day. Summer weeks stalled forever, and long marriages always the same. Lives with only emergencies, births, and fishing for excitement. Then a ship comes out of the mist. Or comes around the bend carefully one morning in the rain, past the pines and shrubs. Arrives on a hot fragrant night, grandly, all lit up. Gone two days later, leaving fury in its wake. For Susan Crosby Lawrence Anderson

Poems

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

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Poems

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Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

More by this poet

Finding Something (audio only)

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

South

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