Meem's Reviews > The Great Fires

Almost every time I drop acid (something I've come to associate with clarity), I find myself returning to my favorite poem from "The Great Fires," the book of poetry I cherish the most in the world.

Then, in a frenzy, I try to decode its meaning for unsuspecting strangers, wildly gesticulating toward any bonfire unfortunate enough to be nearby and exclaiming, "Can't you SEE the WOOD", desperately hoping they'll catch my drift before I set the whole place on fire.

In the 1970s, the poet Jack Gilbert lived in Japan with his partner, the sculptor Michiko Nogami. Tragically, Ms. Nogami succumbed to cancer in 1982. In her memory, Gilbert wrote "The Great Fires", a collection that meditates on the decade following his beloved wife's passing, offering stark and lyrical poems that portray grief, and the love from which it stems, as enduring physical burdens. Grief, like fire, represents the bare bones of love, persisting after the passage of time and the trials of life have stripped it down to its essence.

My dog-eared copy of this book is one of my most treasured possessions because, among all the words I've encountered, Jack Gilbert's poetry comes closest to capturing the language of love as I experience it, which, almost coincidentally, is the language of grief.

Here it is:
"We think the fire eats the wood.
We are wrong. The wood reaches out
to the flame. The fire licks at
what the wood harbors, and the wood
gives itself away to that intimacy,
the manner in which we and the world
meet each new day. Harm and boon
in the meetings. As heart meets what
is not heart, the way the spirit
encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
looking at the ruin of our garden
in the early dark of November, hearing crows
go over while the first snow shines coldly
everywhere. Grief makes the heart
apparent as much as sudden happiness can."