in the yearning

This poem is for Lan Wangji.

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

—Jack Gilbert (1925-2012), "After Love" from The Dance Most of All, 2009. This poem was also—I believe originally, although I couldn't swear to it—published in The New Yorker on June 30, 2008.