Saturday, August 15, 2015

Explicating the Twilight - Jack Gilbert


                            "...purple is black blooming." ~Jack Gilbert



Explicating the Twilight
Jack Gilbert

The rat makes her way up
the mulberry tree, the branches
getting thin and risky up close
to the fruit, and she slows.
The berry she is after is so ripe,
there is almost no red. Prospero
thinks of Christopher Smart saying
purple is black blooming. She lifts
her mouth to the berry, stretching.
The throat is an elegant gray.
A thousand shades, Christopher wrote
among the crazy people. A thousand
colors from white to silver.

2 comments:

erin said...

such an ecstasy between the elegant extended grey throat and the berry at this volatile precipice! what a poem, ripe in understatement, magnifying intensity!!!

i have been thinking so tenderly of jack gilbert lately, reading his work again (always for the first time!) and adoring him, grateful to and for him.

Kelly said...

I totally visualized this poem while reading it. And that flower... what a deep, gorgeous color!