From the corners of my eyes
the glow of fellow phones,
an eerie phenomena I find
difficult to explain,
even as I, too, used a screen
to trace a brighter path
through the desert dark
back to my car.
I tried to describe this
to my mother over the phone
but mostly listened to serrated
packets of digital information
scramble in a satellite signal
that remained clear enough
to broadcast the sound
of her curious cough.
Can you imagine a total absence
of mystery light so distinct
as to create a truer darkness?
This shared thought,
if understood as a virtual
sound, can abbreviate
the space between us,
creating a form of weather.
4.
I already wish
this were beginning.
Any omissions here aren’t born
from a lack of watching
the mountains in the dark
and hoping for a sign.
What part of understand
don’t you remember?
Swipe down from the top
to view your notifications.
In an ocean to the south,
a great dish pointed
toward a globular star cluster
beams out our cosmic message.
Hello, hello, is anyone out there?
The night sky returns
a dial tone of dendritic light
and lacunae.
My mother’s cough is more strange
the clearer the images become
inside her chest.
Hello, hello, odd cough,
what have you visited my mother for?
The scientists analyze the signal
and so far agree: all static.
A Texas wind pushes
old branches against
the steel roof to scrawl
their illegible prescriptions.
The more I wonder,
the less I seem to know,
but this is my temple,
and I keep my temple clean.
5.
If there really is another world,
maybe we can walk to the edge
of town where beyond
the FOR SALE sign
marking the last empty lot
is a rusty barbed-wire fence
the desert wind can pass
through without a scratch.
At midnight, a hundred televisions
woosh back into darkness.
No aircraft floating out there,
no cell-phone-tower beacons
pulsing with favorites.
So you can get a good look
at the aberrant spray of stars
and the space slowly swallowing them.
Can it be true
our primary job
here on earth is to wait?
If there really is another world,
maybe all the languages are there too,
still desperate to perform,
sentences full of bright shards,
straining to shorten distances
by opening up staticky channels.
It’s odd we assume whatever is out there
will be able to understand us
any better than we do.
From the mountains there’s a little glow,
like a campfire, or maybe old headlights.
Before I left for Texas
I watched my daughter dance
her last ballet of the season,
yellowed spotlights
tracing the movements of children
dressed as antique soldiers,
ground troops deployed
to clear and hold space
for the sugar plum fairies to spin
as the boy suspended high above
sprinkled phony snow
onto a real stage,
and it became quiet enough to hear
the oldest man cough,
as if already wondering
whether it was time to show
his grandchildren the yellowest
part of his teeth and ask them
when and how in this world
they would begin making money.
I don’t believe in the paranormal,
but I do believe in poems,
another system of haunts,
pulling the rip cord
inside your head
so the aperture opens
to allow in more light.
There is a way to practice patience
so that it verges on disobedience,
your last thought creating the next,
any association codifying the theory.
This was always
going to be about possibilities,
one definition of love.
We made this together, this we,
more or less alone now
slowly beginning to spin.
Like in a museum
when the visitors whisper
without being told
out of respect for what
lives there larger and lingers
at night long after
the guards hang up
dust circling in the moonlight
falling through the courtyard’s
glass ceiling for no one to see,
something big enough
to ignore us right back,
maybe drifting oceanward,
where it returns to an inkling.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the editors of the following publications for providing homes to earlier versions of these poems, some under different titles:
The Academy of American
Poets Poem-a-Day “L’Avenir Est Quelque Chose”
Bat City Review “Everything I’ve Learned So Far”
“Fall In”
Boog City Reader “Roll Call”
Columbia Poetry Review “Idaho”
Conduit “Selected Poems”
“Litany”
Denver Quarterly “Substitution”
Forklift, Ohio “Ode to the Future”
The Freshwater Review “The Impossibility of Sending You a Postcard from Mumbai”
Horsethief “Fire Drill”
The Iowa Review “What the Cold Wants”
jubilat “Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber”
Poetry East “Bed in Winter”
Poetry Northwest “Now Where Were We?”
“April Light”
St. Ann’s Review “Why I Don’t Have Any Tattoos”
“Fickle Sun, Loyal Shadow” first appeared as a chapbook published by Sixth Finch. Thank you to editors Rob MacDonald and Dara Cerv.
“To Be Transmitted by Fax” first appeared in If You’ve Received This Message in Error: Dispatches from the North American Fax Registry, Volume 1, the creation of artist Andy Sturdevant, and the last known fax-delivery-only art publication in the US (www.facsimilepress.org).
“Ziggurat” first appeared on the cassette-only psychodrone album Predawn to Postdusk by Umbral. Thank you to Daniel Hales and Spork Press.
“Bed in Winter” is after Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Bed in Summer.”
More thank yous: To the Lannan Foundation for a Residency Fellowship in Marfa, Texas, that aided in the completion of this book. To the Minnesota State Arts Board for an Artist Initiative Grant that provided time and space to write. To my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin for their generosity while I served as visiting associate professor in 2014.
To my editor Jeff Shotts and everyone at Graywolf Press for their support. To Amanda Nadelberg, Ed Bok Lee, sam sax, and Dean Young for thei
r careful attention to these poems. To Yuji Agematsu, whose marvelous art is featured on the book’s cover.
To Kathy and Scarlett Moon most of all.
DOBBY GIBSON is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recently It Becomes You, which was shortlisted for the Believer Poetry Award. He’s been awarded fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The text of Little Glass Planet is set in Adobe Garamond Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free,
30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.