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Poem Whispered While Being Blown into Molten Glass, Then Shattered
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LITTLE GLASS PLANET
Also by Dobby Gibson
Polar
Skirmish
It Becomes You
LITTLE GLASS PLANET
POEMS
DOBBY GIBSON
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2019 by Dobby Gibson
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-842-6
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-889-1
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2019
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958150
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: Yuji Agematsu. Zip: 01.01.14 … 12.31.14 (details). Mixed media in cigarette pack cellophane wrappers (365 units). On wood-backed acrylic shelves, latex paint (12 units). Wrappers, each approx.: 2½ x 2⅛ x 1 inches (6.3 x 5.3 x 2.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist, Yale Union, Portland, and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Photo: Aaron Flint Jamison and Scott Ponik.
Contents
Dear Reader
Prayer for November
Elegy for Abe Vigoda
Idaho
L’Avenir Est Quelque Chose
Drone
Fire Drill
To Be Transmitted by Fax
Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber
What the Cold Wants
Roll Call
Substitution
I Can Do It All in My Lifetime
Ode to the Future
• • •
Fickle Sun, Loyal Shadow
• • •
Inside the Compulsion to Wonder Lurks the Will to Survive
Everything I’ve Learned So Far
Selected Poems
Why I Don’t Have Any Tattoos
The Impossibility of Sending You a Postcard from Mumbai
Litany
Bed in Winter
Ziggurat
Now Where Were We?
Fall In
April Light
• • •
Trace
LITTLE GLASS PLANET
Dear Reader
Though we’ve done this many times before
it doesn’t make it any less miraculous
that a fugitive intimacy can sequester itself
in the nearly invisible here
dissolving an entire alphabet into thoughts
strung from more distant thoughts like stars
inside a strange machine
that counts on you to propel it
with a joule of your mind’s breath
pushing young ships into the harbor
where they ferry the very idea
that music needs no mediation
tacking this way and then that
as if each to earn the name
we moments ago christened them with
INTUITION LAYAWAY LAST HOPE
new fleets drifting off as older ones threaten return
across soft borders some smuggling some gone
long enough to reappear as unrecognizable
as paint swatches read differently in the sun
another among the infinite things that blue-green
never names but still colors wildly
in the spell that watches over you as you lie awake
a little longer wondering what happens to the hours
Prayer for November
Brazen angels, stubborn saboteurs
send us a sign.
Silent priests of the coat check,
cherubs of every appetite, all the powers of ten,
if we can believe in you, we can believe again.
Assure us we’ll be spared. Tell us it’s been you
ghostwriting our astonishing memoirs all along.
Loyal docents, restless spirits of lost chess-masters,
dogs with one eye, lead us home.
Spray-paint the orange X on our doors
and place the warm coin into our hands.
Promise it won’t end in any of the ways
we think it will. Pile snow onto the capitol
and fossilize the partisans. Stuff sawdust
into the senators’ crooked mouths
and announce the lies have all been told.
Spoon the cure onto every cracked tongue—
then kiss the food right down our throats.
Afternoon breeze of one syllable,
arsonists with no matches, stab wounds
healing into smiles, taxis at midnight, shine on.
Shine your penlights into the backs of our eyes
and swear you see no blindness.
Whisper the forgotten melody into our ears.
Show the skywriters how to spell
without looking back, we’ve been fools,
we’ve wasted more than we’ve saved,
we can be loved after all.
Elegy for Abe Vigoda
The most horrible person
has been elected president.
The hardest thing to fathom
is the present. Familiar sounds arrive
at my door from the school down the street.
The kid with the freshest haircut
holds a rubber football while hosting
a Chautauqua on defensive pass interference.
Seven students stand at the back
of the orchestra, stoned with percussion.
For the thirty-third time in her life
a science teacher announces the oldest
layer of rock is called Precambrian.
They’ve trained us to believe anything.
So is the rumor true? Yes, Abe Vigoda has died.
That name, like something resurrected
from a dictionary. Abe: another word
for honesty. And vigoda, meaning:
a sacred temple for vampires.
About the past I never feel the same way twice.
When I was sick and my father somewhere
across the planet, a Trinitron television
wheeled into my bedroom dispensed the medicine
of Abe Vigoda by slow drip.
I could hear the ice thunder
as it calved in the pond across the street.
Like a superhero with the powers
of an exhausted mime, Abe Vigoda cured
my fear of g
hosts while teaching me
how to wear the suit of adulthood
the right amount reluctantly,
and holster my revolver behind
my back where I can never reach it.
My father is again far from me,
visiting the clinic where they treat
idiopathic positional vertigo
by reorienting the crystals of the inner ear,
which once helped him toss
exceptional spirals timed perfectly
so that as I caught or not
the football I crashed into arbor vitae
that was the closest thing I had
to a brother pummeling wisdom into me.
The past is surprisingly punctual.
All of time is with us here,
each next moment waiting right where we left it
when we last felt safe inside our heads
wondering what kind of leathery faces
they might grow into as we held
the flashlight beneath our chins
to say the one funny thing we needed to
while leaning into the dark.
Idaho
The best thing about riding a horse
is the better shadow you make. The best part
of the better shadow is knowing only half
of what it’s thinking. Even doing nothing is a form
of moving on. Through the white pines
the horses walk single file, in a sentence, each rider
another noun aspiring to the verb to be.
The forest has no replica. Its beasts disprove everything.
At dusk, your worries are a sack of rabbits
you have to carry down to the river
and press slowly beneath the surface
until you feel it go still. In the morning,
when you wake, you’ll think you stitched
the valley back together by opening your eyes.
L’Avenir Est Quelque Chose
All day for too long
everything I’ve thought to say
It’s hard to remember how
I came to possess whichever one
I find in my hand, or hanging there now
upside-down in the closet like sleeping bats,
each one too tiny or huge,
like our own ideas, always needing
to be shaken off and folded up
before we can properly forget them on the train.
Most of my predictions are honestly
just hopes: a sudden sundress in March,
regime change in the North,
or the one where Amanda
wins the big book award from the baby boomers.
There’s that green-and-white umbrella
the cereal-company interns handed us
outside the doomed ball game,
the one for sun,
the one with a wooden handle
as crooked as the future
we reach for whenever one of us
needs a stand-in for a dance partner.
You once opened it in the living room
so Scarlett could have a picnic
beneath what felt to her like a tent,
as it felt to me like my prediction
we would live forever was already true.
When trying to understand I tend to look up
and occasionally spot nothing
more than a thousand pinholes in black nylon,
it’s enough to get you to Greece and back,
or something to kiss beneath,
who knows how this is going to play out?
I know you won’t ever be able to say
exactly what you’re feeling either.
The way thoughts pop open overhead
as we pull closer to what’s between us,
the rain playing the drum
that’s suddenly us.
Drone
Isn’t this the life
Weren’t the white feathers
feathering the young
Shouldn’t the invention solve the disease
Didn’t the guilt end with the getaway
Aren’t you the clever one
For the splash of silver sense
For the fountainry of phonemes
For a grownup desk job
And without winter
Without any equinox or ration
In the cast that hasn’t dried
In the sutures of our own skin
Weren’t the Lilliputians sweet
Everybody crossing their eyes sees the figure eight
Everyone’s a satellite
Everyone becomes that star
Everybody dance everybody get out
Will the mouse outrun the hawk
Will the impulse to resist bring a will to surrender
Will the owner of a green Subaru Outback
please report to the Fan Information Booth
on Concourse C
Did we ever doubt our devices
Did we punch the right holes in the earth
Did the queen smash her bottle across
the hull did the little ones toe the line
Was 16 the correct number
Was the whispering coming from inside the hut
Was the instant they stopped running
the moment the verdict was returned
Was the balcony high enough for a view
Aren’t you glad you’re more headlight than deer
Aren’t the birds quiet before they strike
Isn’t the view marvelous
Isn’t the hum like hearing a needle sew
Isn’t the technology immaculate
Shouldn’t this much be obvious
Shouldn’t we praise the distance
Shouldn’t the crater be great enough
to bury the dead
Didn’t we greet each other with our eyes
Don’t our values begin with logic
Doesn’t a clock cookie time
Up from the higher laws
Up until the chorus
Up in the sky it’s a bird it’s an eagle
Aren’t we safer behind our keyboards
Aren’t you sweet
Isn’t this grand isn’t this just like them
Don’t you wish you knew what they were thinking
Don’t you dare draw the gods
Wouldn’t we be fools to fail to admire the screen
Were your coordinates correct
As long as your life lives
As long as you’re asking
As if lightning struck down
As if distance could be clean
For now the fog lowers into the bay
For now the young engineers get tattoos
For now let them think it’s brave
Now take one small step to your right
Now and that’s an order
Now the winds hush
and you gust upon this earth
Fire Drill
I hope you have a month
to read the first fifteen chapters
of your own autobiography
they’re about an atom.
Some say the sun
meant more then.
Today a few more trees are scheduled
to release their fall collections.
I don’t have a swatch
for their nesting instinct.
I don’t have the right crayon
for insomnia.
When I say you are this morning’s incumbent
I mean accomplice.
When I swipe down with my thumb
to refresh the present
the Next Now arrives in the nick of time.
Next Now, heal us with opportunity.
Next Later, assure us our preferences have been saved.
What if I really am a suspension bridge
and by standing here
I make my most profound gesture
toward the world?
What if the sun were on a game show—
could anyone stop it?
I shouldn’t talk this way.
Twinkle twinkle everyone outside.
You wanted a revolution,
you’re getting an operating system update.
The past tense of to be is was.
You can check was off your bucket list.
To Be Transmitted by Fax
Like a movie that begins
in an isolated polar research facility,
R.J. MacReady asking the crew
tough questions about
the odd Malamute that’s wandered in
off the tundra—when suddenly
the generator blows—
I like it when the lights go out.
I like shopping for groceries
with a storm on the way
making choices I’ll question for days,
everyone’s in a rush
and the coffee’s about to run out.
I like imagining you
grocery shopping in the rain
in a mid-sized coastal town
where I don’t know the names
of the regional chains
or the shortcut through the park
where the kids play a game
for hours before realizing
no one’s keeping score.
In the corner drugstore
there’s a yellowing machine
that appears to have heard
it all before, no urgent news
coming in over the transom.
But from the other side of the hills
there’s the sound of chopper blades
and a flickering searchlight.
When you press
the machine’s green button
you can hear the song
of a line left open.
Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber
Little glass planet,
I like picking you up.
As if I’m holding my own thought,
one blown molten with a puff
of some craftsman’s breath—is it still inside you?
You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine
anyone hurling you into the sea,
but eventually we all have a job to do.
I think of the early mornings and storm warnings
you braved to find the village dinner.