5/29/11

Married || Jack Gilbert

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,
from 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
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

--

You can just taste the loneliness drifting around the air of this poem. Jack Gilbert's poems for Michiko are all sad and lovely. They have their own heart. The ending is sweet, yet restless.

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