Margaret Gibson Poetry

(excerpt)

Round, around the walnut table
with its central stem and lion’s feet
(where the children, barefoot, put
their toes in the smooth grooves
and stroked the beast beneath the table)
I gathered us for dinners.
I remember the idle talk of boats
and houses, tall glasses of iced tea,
cups of milk. I remember how Stephen
carved, each slice so perfectly
drawn down he might as well have used
his architect’s rule. I remember
linens that were never marked
by purpled circles or half circles.
Bart sailed bread cubes
over the surface of his soup. Sarah made
stories from her blue willow plate—
birds changed back to lovers,
a house floated like a flower
beneath a bridge, around the world
to China, where someone needed succor,
needed her potatoes—I’d given
her too much to eat.

I remember Stephen missing dinner—
too much work, late conferences, too much
booze—each absence so unpredictable
I refused to take out a table leaf
or know he wasn’t coming. I liked
our dinner mats just to touch
at the top corners. I liked the easy
reach of hands joined first
to bless this food to our use,
the easy reach of my fork into Sarah’s
plate, into Bart’s.
I remember, oh,
setting the table the night
Bart died, four places, and his special
cup—I had to, I don’t know why.
Although Stephen, pushing his plate
into the flowers, scraping the floor
with his chair, said he knew.
Sarah watched us dry eyed.
Her spoon turned circles in her soup.
The ripples widened, and when
Jennie came to be in Bart’s place,
the emptiness filled. We were
a happy family, or I wanted us
to be . . .

. . . but just as I am writing entirely dark
a dull thump at the window, muffled,
strikes me still, unlatches then catches me
swift to the sill, where, down from the oak
shearing over, or from the shagbark, swept
too near, a bird has flown into itself,
in the unfathomed depth of the selfless glass
its own self-shadow seen too late—too late
in the riddling and (your word) fire-dint rise
and fall of bright air and curved branch—rebuffed,
then stunned, or worse. Too firmly I hold
to what I’ve seen before, expecting to find
a smudge, a smear, blear share and bits of down,
a hint of blood. But there on the glass,
foreshortened, the whole bird, ghosted, is—
its shrugged head sidewise, soft breast full on,
plush, the arc of its extended wing, the front edge
of its flying there, obliquely, as if
with a soft brush a Taoist had summoned
from ink and water, as gracefully awry
as the fling of early forsythia,
the very essence of grief—for it is a mourning dove,
I think, windhovering, backlit by bright air. . .
the blunt breath of that moment of impact
held on the glass, and so breathtaking, so
beautiful I can tell the flash and mortal
dazzle of the bird, and its probable pain—
mind-sloggering, smoldered and unadorned
auras of invisible pain. No need
to ask you, Hopkins, what works so darkly
in our favor, and sustains. What keeps me
from blank despair is just this word-tumbled
world of ours, not ours, rough and not rounded,
scabrous not smooth, pitted, pocked and twisted,
twined, twinned, all of its pattern and disturbance
evidence of power, poised power,
entirely dark, flung at random toward us,
or wrung out of us, ready or not—ours
only to give, obliquely faithful, back. And so,
you said lavish or little; you looked, and your soul,
entirely dark, impoverished, chaste, sent back
in song your unborn, deathless self—that is,
everything and nothing, like the moon eclipsed
in fullest meeting. And the dove? I found no dove
on the hard ground. I missed the moment it cleared
the glass and veered off, unsteady, into the upsoaring wind.
And then, like grace the rain, the rain misting in.

One day I will not wake in my body as you know it
or go from the bed to the open
door to breathe in the fresh glory of the morning.

Although you will not see me, by afternoon I will be
wind, unfenced in the expanse
between towering clouds of oyster and plum air.

I will be in the oak, in the ivy, in the spillway
and banks thick with iris,
yellow-eyed and blue, and in the tannic and bittersweet

silk of the pond over which clouds pause and reflect
before shattering the surface.
I will be in the rain, in the stone, in the root, in the fruits

of the garden. You will take me into your mouth
(as so often you have)
and we will be one body of solitudes and barrens and wilds.

We will be mountain and cirrus, salamander, owl in the dark
husk of winter, a crescendo
of cicadas in summer. We will fly in a flash of green light

over fields taking shape in the early morning mists. Here,
always here. So close, there is
nothing more I can tell you than what we already know.

An art, not a right, happiness,
according to the Dalai Lama
(David reads aloud to me)
is not as elused
as one might think, but clozer
and grisp. I wonder
if his screwing up
how words are said is prologue
to a deeper detour in the neuronal relays . . .
or is it faulty eyesight
as he speeds over the lines
if small print?
Now he looks out the window
at a steady drizzle.
He smiles and calls it
“the seep and slur of rain.”
He enjoys
punching out the stressed
syllables as he returns
to reading—
a measure of personal
happiness—happiness
our purpose in life,
not selfish as one might suppose,
although the wish to avoid
unhappiness
may be. And I remember
a friend’s sad report:
“He put his urine-soaked
underpants on my face
one night as I slept.”
She told me this serenely,
as if the experience
she had with her husband’s
dementia would be mine, there
was no stopping it. I said nothing,
only fixed my mind
on the remembered smell
of David’s skin—something like
saffron married to a whiff of ripe
pears and worn-out
cotton undershirts. Blindfolded,
I could distinguish David
and find him in a crowd of men,
were I allowed to snuffle
each man’s neck and smell
the difference—
and that thought gave me
happiness
as unexpected as was the glimpse of the road
that moved beneath us
as we sped home on a morning
long ago, after
a night of reading each other’s
poems aloud, every
blessed one of them,
the road beneath us seen through the rotting-out
porous floor
of the old jeep
as we traveled at the
speed of light,
and nothing, nothing
could slow us down
or keep us
separate from each other
or the road, wherever it took us.

Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, “Passage”

Once in sunlight I pinned to the clothesline a cotton sheet, a plane of light
sheer as the mind of God,

before we imagined that mind creased by a single word.
With my hand I smoothed any rivel, any shirr, any suggestion of pleat or furrow.

Whatever it was I wanted from that moment, I can’t say. It failed to edify.
Nor did I bow.

And yet the memory holds, and there is a joy that recurs in me much as the scent
of summer abides in air dried sheets I unfold long after,

lying down in them as one might in a meadow,
as one might with a lover, as one might court the Infinite, however long it takes.