Explicating the Twilight by Jack Gilbert
Explicating the Twilight
Jack GilbertThe rat makes her way up
the mulberry tree, the branches
getting thin and risky up close
to the fruit, and she slows.
The berry she is after is so ripe,
there is almost no red. Prospero
thinks of Christopher Smart saying
purple is black blooming. She lifts
her mouth to the berry, stretching.
The throat is an elegant gray.
A thousand shades, Christopher wrote
among the crazy people. A thousand
colors from white to silver.
MARGINALIA
I have started drawing again. I meant to write poems, but that is what I did last night. It felt like a little piece of me had come home.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert by Jack Gilbert, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
ABOUT JACK GILBERT
Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh on February 18, 1925. He was educated in both Pittsburgh and San Francisco, where he later participated in Jack Spicer’s famous “Poetry as Magic” workshop at San Francisco State College in 1957. Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy (Yale University Press, 1962), won the Yale Younger Poets Series and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Soon after publishing his first book, Gilbert received a Guggenheim Fellowship and subsequently moved… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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