Thera

We were all Jack Gilbert’s lovers, not in the world

but in the poems, in the world of the poems, dying

on the rocky broken spurs of hard islands in a blue

country across the sea, lovers carried in his arms

for decades sometimes, more, the wind a character

that refused to lift the center of the word pain, where

vowels fall into the letter n the way the summer,

wheat-blazed and feral, pours into the cold weeks

of November, winter in its bones to come. Jack

loved us, not as a god or a devil, however nuanced,

but as one who must attend to the difficult harvest

of a life, to the losses and the simple grain that we might,

if we listen beyond the howling in our own hearts, hear 

him singing about as he carries us up the dead mountain.