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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert
The author of several collections of poetry, Jack Gilbert has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Living
"I'm afraid of death"
by Kathleen Ossip
Another Elegy
by Jericho Brown
Ashes of Life
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
August, 1953
by David Wojahn
Characteristics of Life
by Camille T. Dungy
Coda
by Marilyn Hacker
Daily Life
by Susan Wood
Difficult Body
by Mark Wunderlich
Elegy in Joy [excerpt]
by Muriel Rukeyser
far memory
by Lucille Clifton
First Things to Hand
by Robert Pinsky
Frozen
by Natasha Head
How to Uproot a Tree
by Jennifer K. Sweeney
I could suffice for Him, I knew (643)
by Emily Dickinson
Insomnia
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Life
by Joe Brainard
Life is Fine
by Langston Hughes
Little Night Prayer
by Péter Kántor
Living in Numbers
by Claire Lee
Lost and Found
by Ron Padgett
Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus [excerpt]
by Denise Levertov
Meditation 29
by Philip Pain
On Living
by Nazim Hikmet
One Train May Hide Another
by Kenneth Koch
Primitive State [excerpt]
by Anselm Berrigan
Samurai Song
by Robert Pinsky
Spent
by Mark Doty
sugar is smoking
by Jason Schneiderman
Summer in Winter in Summer
by Noah Eli Gordon
The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz
The Old Stoic
by Emily Brontė
The Pain
by Laura Kasischke
The Secret
by Denise Levertov
Thrown as if Fierce & Wild
by Dean Young
Variation on a Theme
by W. S. Merwin
Virgil's Hand
by Francesc Parcerisas
What the Living Do
by Marie Howe
What Wild-Eyed Murderer
by Peter Meinke
Where I Live
by Maxine Kumin
won't you celebrate with me
by Lucille Clifton
Yellow Beak
by Stephen Dobyns
Poems About Weddings
Endymion, Book I, [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]
by John Keats
Epithalamium, [Happy Bridegroom]
by Sappho
In Memoriam, Epilogue, [O true and tried, so well and long]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
A Ditty
by Sir Philip Sidney
A Slice of Wedding Cake
by Robert Graves
A Wedding Toast
by Richard Wilbur
Chateau If
by Peter Gizzi
Epithalamion
by Edmund Spenser
Epithalamium
by Matthew Rohrer
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116)
by William Shakespeare
Magnolia
by Gerald Stern
Marriage
by William Carlos Williams
Plural Happiness
by David Rivard
Sonnet 8 [Set me where as the sun doth parch the green]
by Petrarch
The First Marriage
by Peter Meinke
The Kiss
by Stephen Dunn
The maidens came
by Anonymous
To My Dear and Loving Husband
by Anne Bradstreet
To Sylvia, To Wed
by Robert Herrick
Wedding Poems
When a Woman Loves a Man
by David Lehman
Related Prose
Coming to the End of His Triumph: A Retrospective on Jack Gilbert
by Dan Albergotti
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Tear It Down

 
by Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.






Copyright © 2001 Jack Gilbert. From The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, 2001, Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
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