below, night's sheen on its belly. Silence except
for the machinery clanging deeper in us. You will
love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time
running out. Day after day of the everyday.
What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.
Newness strutting around as if it were significant.
Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.
I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death
when I cried every day among the trees. To the real.
To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.
Fulke Greville (1554-1628), in poem LXIX from his sequence Caelica, tapers from a doomsday vision to a love affair that is "amiss." He goes from the macrocosmic "All" of burning seas and heavenly justice, through the intermediate level of worldly disorder, to his personal lament: "With them that walk against me is my sun." As with Gilbert's poem, the comparison is not exactly between the outward, violent images and the personal grief: It is something more like a comparison between the violent energy of the imagination that assembles the outward images and phrases, and the inward hurt:
When all this All doth pass from age to age,
And revolution in a circle turn,
Then heavenly justice doth appear like rage,
