Kunstkammer by Jack Gilbert

We are resident inside the machinery,
a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.
We exist with a wind whispering inside
and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,
inside the basilica of bones. The flesh
is a neighborhood, but not the life.
Our body is not good at memory, at keeping.
It is the spirit that holds on to our treasure.
The dusk in Italy when the ferry passed Bellagio
and turned across Lake Como in the hush to where
we would land and start up the grassy mountain.
The body keeps so little of the life after
being with her eleven years,
and the mouth not even that much. But the heart
is different. It never forgets
the pine trees with the moon rising behind them
every night. Again and again we put our
sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed
them back into their death, each moving slowly
into the dark, disappearing as our hearts
visited and savored, hurt and yearned.