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Years and Years and Years Later Dan Albergotti
From this distance he can see that the manis not Jack Gilbert. And he is not yet himself. Being himself would not be better than being Gilbert. Only Gilbert is more than Gilbert. Failure is better than success in the same way that this poem is still getting at something as it descends into parody, elegy, and palimpsest at once. We die and are put into the earth forever is a line directly stolen from Gilbert’s “Tear It Down.” Putting it in this poem means neither success nor failure nor larceny. People need to read it even if its magnitude of beauty is too difficult for people. When I spoke with Jack on the telephone to invite him to my university the next fall, he mostly wanted to talk about my Italian name, to ask about my poems. He wanted to know what I wanted from poetry. I said I’d like to say something to someone born two hundred years from now. I think he approved, or I may have just heard his enormously generous spirit smiling. After his summer in Greece with Linda, he could not remember ever having talked to me, told my colleague who called to make travel arrangements that he had never heard of our university. Today the woman I love rejected my artificial soul. What is it we want from poetry? When Jack Gilbert and I have been put into the earth forever, what will it mean if someone reads “Tear It Down” or “Years and Years and Years Later”? Is there still time to insist? Let my heart be feral, too wild for every woman I love. This poem, Jack, is as helpless as crushed birds, and still I say with you, nevertheless. Originally appeared in The Greensboro Review |
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