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,
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
this long black hair tangled in the dirt.
R.T. Smith: “Jack Gilbert’s wife Michiko Nogami died in her thirties from cancer, and in this moving poem, lacking many of the trappings of elegy, he overwhelms by understating. It occurs to me the proper response for a reader is awe, rather than analysis, and I feel fortunate that I can still hear Jack’s voice in it. A critic once referred to Gilbert as a “lyric ghost.” Seems right.”
My father died of cardiac arrest in his truck up north by Alaska, where he hauled oil alone. I’m told he always drove with a letter I wrote him in college, slipped in his breast pocket. So maybe he wasn’t alone. He still visits me in my dreams, where I hold him until he turns to sand.
Grief can be a wailing Sicilian woman, a melancholic Portuguese fado, or a strand of hair dormant in soil.
But it’s always a shock when, at the grocery store squeezing ripe bananas or looking out into the parking lot outside my apartment, it announces itself to me out of the blue, in Gilbert’s understated way.
We never escape loss, do we?
Great poem. Appreciate the context too.
💔💔💔 a love like that I wonder if it exists in our shallow world today…loss will bring one to his/her knees for sure, it’s the most humbling experience of our existence, it crushes the ego, by reminding us once more that our existence is temporary. It’s crazy how years later you look back at the memories and sometimes you wonder if it was all but a dream.