THE FIRST MORNING OF THE WORLD ON LONG ISLAND
For Doris
The provisional and awkward harp of me
makes nothing of you now.
I labor to constrain it but am unschooled and cannot.
One learns to play the harp, said Aristotle, by playing.
But I do not. Such a harp grows always more dear and I manage always less truly well. Each visitor offhand does better. While I with this year of loss can do nothing.
Can say nothing of the smell of rain in the desert
and the cottonwoods blowing above us. If it would tell even so little of Council Bluffs.
But it will not.
I can make it mourn but not celebrate the River nor my happiness in having been of you.
#JackGilbert 
