One quick glance at his book of poetry, and I became a Jack Gilbert fan. He's blowing my mind.
Without researching the inspiration behind his collection _The Great Fires_ I'm gathering that they're stories twisted around his feelings over his wife's death.
I don't understand grief. I feel it, I ache with it, but words for understanding it simply escape me.
There's grief for people I've lost and that's perhaps the worst. But there's also grief for a lost self, lost time, and lost compassion - all of which I grieve for frequently.
The sting of a lost companion is bright, and broadcast on a wire of pain. But memory that surrounds them will hopefully keep their spirit buoyant and warm, though no less tender.
The whimper of grief for less tangible things is perhaps more personal, as its burden isn't shouldered by anyone else. Nobody else grieves for the childhood home and the backyard memories stored there quite like you. Nobody recalls the innocent wonder about the microcosmic world of insects in the same way you do. Nobody misses swells of emotion that used to visit you when you would sit at the piano and weep for the sound of Chopin flowing out of your fingers. These are private losses and they're sweet and lovely. By design, they're transient - footsteps echoing down a hollow corridor. But a thousand tiny fragments of memory are hard to catalogue. It's so easy for splinters to slide under floorboards and become forgotten.
Last weekend, Katie and I encountered a childhood relic. As we opened it up, we drew our breath in tandem, as though we uncovered a time machine. Her dollhouse, the only remaining bit of furniture from her childhood bedroom...we opened it with a creak as the bottled and chapped memories spilled out.
So, perhaps afterall, there's less grief in small moments when you can sit beside someone and without speaking, share in the knowledge that your two inner universes share a solar system - that for a brief period of your lives, you orbited the same sun.
T.
