It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees along the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time. In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama. Now it waits in New England while I say grace over almost everything: for a possum dead on someone’s lawn, the sing light on a levee while Northampton sleeps, and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side with barley. Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America. The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods, but already it looks discarded as the birds return and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited. My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.
You can find this poem in the Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert
The heart is a foreign country ❤️
Gilbert is so good. It waits. Deep in our hearts. Our poetry will arise in a place that is not the mind. It patiently and mysteriously waits there and slowly it becomes our lives.