Poem-a-Day Begins with Jack Gilbert

Welcome to poetry month! This April, we’re celebrating the remarkable career of Jack Gilbert, now in his late eighties, with a Collected Poems – here between two covers we have more than fifty years of his luminous awareness of pain and joy running together, his solitary, bittersweet, tough and at times enraptured voice. It’s nearly impossible to choose just one, but in honor of Gilbert’s origins, we offer “Searching for Pittsburgh.”


Searching for Pittsburgh

The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,
between the liver and the stomach. Comes to the heart
and hesitates. Considers and then goes around it.
Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.
Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh
in me. The rusting mills sprawled gigantically
along three rivers. The authority of them.
The gritty alleys where we played every evening were
stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,
as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning
the Earth. Locomotives driving through the cold rain,
lordly and bestial in their strength. Massive water
flowing morning and night throughout a city
girded with ninety bridges. Sumptuous-shouldered,
sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.
All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.
A city of brick and tired wood. Ox and sovereign spirit.
Primitive Pittsburgh. Winter month after month telling
of death. The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.
Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged
by the heart. Making together a consequence of America.
The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.
In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands
with their fields of stone. In beds with women, sometimes,
amid their gentleness. Now the fox will live in our ruined
house. My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound
of water. In this happy place my serious heart has made.

Excerpt from COLLECTED POEMS © 2012 by Jack Gilbert.  Excerpted 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.


Click here to learn more about Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems.

Listen to Jack read “Searching for Pittsburgh.”
Audio