Quotes from Jack Gilbert

Thus the fetus remains vulnerable to the virus. This scenario has been linked to the development of autism-like symptoms in mice

When pregnant women scoop up cat litter and accidentally breathe in the particles, the parasite can find its way to their placentas. Like viruses, it can damage placental cells and cause them to commit suicide. The resulting condition, called toxoplasmosis, can lead to fetal infection, miscarriage, congenital disease, or disability later in life. This is why many pregnant women get their partners to empty the cat box for nine months.

As sworn enemies, bacteria and viruses have been duking it out for billions of years

You hear yourself walking on the snow. You hear the absence of the birds. A stillness so complete, you hear the whispering inside of you. Alone morning after morning, and even more at night. They say we are born alone, to live and die alone. But they are wrong. We get to be alone by time, by luck, or by misadventure. — Jack Gilbert, from "Betrothed," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Your baby comes into the world with a biological program expecting to see conditions similar to that past.

we certainly don't recommend applying yogurt to the vagina or the penis during sex

Nearly a third of babies born in hospitals in the United States are delivered via cesarean section, often due to the cautionary nature of modern obstetrical practice.2 Among seventeen thousand home births in a recent study conducted by the Midwives Alliance of North America, only 5.2 percent needed to go the hospital for a C-section.

many patients demand antibiotics even for ailments that won't benefit from them, such as viral infections, some doctors are likely to give you a prescription because they're worried that you won't leave happy without one.

Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan" Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the acquiescence to death beginning.

The rain and the smell of night pulled at me. Confused me.) Everything means a choice, she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.

The jury may be out over the long-term consequences, but it seems prudent to us to avoid C-sections if you have a choice.

Meanwhile" Loneliness is the mother's milk of America.

A man in Black and White" Some years ago, a child was asked whether he liked radio or television best. The boy said radio, because the pictures were better.

Another Grandfather" Every generation tells of how the good world died.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

The placenta is thought to be an impervious barrier, at least to most bacteria

Imagine if suffering were real. Imagine if those old people were afraid of death. What if the midget or the girl with one arm really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be to live if some people were alone and afraid all their lives.

searches out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process. Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux to give us time to see each thing separate and enough. The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward to know its merit with attention.

The Great Fires" Love is apart from all things. … Love allows us to walk in the sweet music of our particular heart.

Anxiety and depression are both caused by an imbalance in chemicals in our nervous system that stimulate and inhibit how frequently nerves communicate with each other. Too much stimulation or too much inhibition breaks the delicate balance in our nervous system and leads to aberrant behavior.

We look up at the stars and they are not there. We see the memory of when they were, once upon a time. And that too is more than enough.

The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end. — Jack Gilbert, "Waking at Night," The Dance Most of All: Poems . ( Knopf; First Edition edition April 7, 2009)