Quotes from Jack Gilbert

Why do so many ...settle for so little? I don't understand why they're not greedy for what's inside them

How could they think women a recreation? Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest? Only the ignorant or the busy could.

I keep trying to feel who I was, and cannot. — Jack Gilbert, from "Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Betrothed" We get to be alone by time, by luck, or by misadventure.

We must risk delight.

What can I do with these people? They come to the risk so dutifully. Are delighted by anecdotes that give them Poetry. Are grateful to be told of diagonals that give them Painting. Good people. But stubborn when warned the beast is not domestic. How can I persuade them that the dark, soulful Keats was five feet one? Liked fighting and bear-baiting? I can't explain the red hair. Nor say how you died so full of lust for Fanny Brawne. I will tell them of Semele.

The Abandoned Valley" Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico raising peacocks for the rest of your life.

It is foolish for Rubens to show her simpering. They were clearly guilty and did her much sorrow.

You can't work in a steel mill and think small.

Getting Ready" What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes, but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day on these immense, perishing fields? What then? (Desire is not the problem. This far south, we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.) He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.

So yes, this means dirt is good. Mud pies rule.

let your kids experience as much microbial diversity as you can find. Get them outside, let them interact with animals, allow them to play in the dirt, rivers, streams, ocean. Don't sterilize everything they are going to touch or put into their mouth. A great example of this is the pacifier that falls on the ground. Parents who sterilize the binky run the risk of increasing the likelihood that their child will develop food sensitivities later in life.

Goodness is a triumph. And so it is / with love. Love is not the part / we are born with that flowers / a little and then wanes as we / grow up. We cobble love together / from this and those of our machinery / until there is suddenly an apparition / that never existed before.

A Brief for the Defense We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

To the best of our knowledge, there's no evidence that GMOs (genetically modified organisms that have been designed or manipulated to produce certain characteristics) can affect your child's microbiome in any way.

Roundup, has been correlated with changes in the animal microbiome.

This research raises the possibility that regular consumption of artificial sweeteners may induce a shift in levels of the hormones that control insulin production

silver nitrate eyedrops. This almost completely eradicated the disease. But it turns out that silver nitrate is nasty. It can cause chemical burns and temporary blindness itself.

When you take an antibiotic, you tend to wipe out a lot of good bacteria while trying to get at the bad ones. It's like weeding with a bulldozer instead of a trowel.

Doing Poetry Poem, you sonofabitch, it's bad enough that I embarrass myself working so hard to get it right even a little, and that little grudging and awkward. But it's afterwards I resent, when the sweet sure should hold me like a trout in the bright summer stream. There should be at least briefly access to your glamour and tenderness. But there's always this same old dissatisfaction instead.

MEELEE'S AWAY (after Waley)     Meelee's away in Lima.     No one breeds flowers in my head. Of course, women do breed flowers in my head     but not like Meelee's—     So fragile, so pale.

I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment, crying hard, searching for my wife's hair. For two months got them from the drain, from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator, and off the clothes in the closet. But after other Japanese women came, there was no way to be sure which were hers, and I stopped. A year later, repotting Michiko's avocado, I find a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

The Spirit and the Soul" The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged under the ribs.