Poems

Irrevocable

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

::

Someone no longer alive

is hovering over a great expanse of smartweed, panic grass, and midden
where a house used to be
where trees and gardens once flourished

where puddles and ponds held a sky of clouds and stars
in place
for a moment

and you lived there . . . Ah, my dear

::

I speak from the liminal space where your beloved’s last barely audible breath
slipped into your body

then out the window into the winter chill, whose horizon line it rolled up as if
it was twine

into a point, a still point—
a full stop that opens the heart

From that point, I speak

::

As once you washed the body of your beloved
let us wash
for the last time

this one earth, this only, and only once, for once and for all

earth
as if it were a lover who has died, and we, not knowing what to do

at last must wash the poles, north and south
where long ago the ice

cracked open
sheared off
and melted
Last, the mountain peaks

Last, the crowns of oaks and maples, on whose bare branches long strips of torn
plastic flutter

Also the steeples, the turrets, the domes

Last, the open fields and meadows, wash them clean

the vast desert and its last oasis

riverbeds and shrunken rills

ravines and gullies

the rocky promontories from which we viewed the sea
as it rose to cover the cities
Last, the cities

submerged full fathom or in low tide only the towers and the tips of the high-rises
winking up

Last, the sidewalks, shop windows, market stalls

Last, pebble, shell, and skull

Last, lark

and satellite, wash them, and the field of broken mirrors

Last, the house

Last, the bed

Last, the hills of midden, and their treasures

a button

a seed

a feather

a zipper

a chip of china plate

Last, the nose cone, the black box

Last, the trawler, the landing gear, the microchip, the missing part

Last the kiva, the sweat lodge, the drum

Last, the prayer rugs, the pews, the cushions

Last, the seat of enlightenment beneath what remains of the small tree’s spreading
canopy

Last, the factories, the foundries, the mills

the maze of subway tunnels

the turnstiles

Last, the eye of the needle through which we could not pass

Last, a gun, a mine, a missile

Last, a bridge

Last, middle C on the piano, last a cello, a violoncello, in particular the Sonata
for Violoncello no. 2 in D, op. 64, by Heinrich von Herzogenberg

precious because it was the last music you listened to

precious because, like the last word your beloved spoke, you did not know it was
last

Last, the pattern of fish displayed on ice, and their many-eyed, one-eyed gaze

Last, the last whale beached on the shore at Truro

Last, the glint of an eye in the periwinkle, the lovely, sinuous ripple of a reclusive
snake

Last, the chemicals, the vitamins, the pills, the chemicals

Last, a hearing aid

a pair of binoculars

a surgeon’s knife, a sling, a robotic hand

Last, to list only a few from the multitude that perished, fox and laughing
gull, swallowtail and hawk

lion panther coyote vole giraffe mosquito trillium hummingbird hibiscus owl

Last, the very last line in a poem by Rilke
the line
you can’t forget the ache of, the line you didn’t enact, not one syllable

of it—
You must change your life

::

Space, of course, lasts

I walk upon it, as one would walk on a tablecloth for a table no one will set

What’s left of my eyesight has dimmed, what I hear is only wind
and that, muted

And because I have nothing to write on, I build cairn after cairn, lifting stones

balancing them

touching what remains in place, as if it were a new alphabet, or a sentence in Braille

You are reading the last of the earth’s last rivers and mountains—do you
know that?

These stones, these silences

the last words

held in mind for a moment

as if they were a net of fireflies shimmering in a summer field one can’t tell apart
from a night sky and stars

Wash them
each stone, each firefly

wash them clean

this one, a love cry

that one, lament

and the last one the wing of a warning you might still be able to hear

just as once, long ago
you caught the smoke of the oracle rising from a rift zone at the center of the earth

::

If these cairns, these stone syllables, survive, there may be no one left to read
the poem they make—
but if by chance, there is . . .

let the stones be read aloud, so that a human voice

might widen its reach, floating off among the stars like the ringing-through
of a great bronze bell

like the audible layers of birdsong gradually moving west as dawn
brightens, or used to

and the great earth turns

Exchange

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

a letter to David
Now that you’ve entered the great silence
I search out your scribbled notes and drafts
the remains of your work-in-progress
Each word I say aloud, drawing each one
into my body as if body were a vault
for treasure—a word you used to say with
a long a. Treasure, pleasure, measure—
I echo your odd torque of the vowel
Had your luck been otherwise, those words
would have been forged by you into memoir
and genealogy, your life a well-made
volume of breath. And so I gather
the scraps, piece by piece; I try to finish
your sentences, I forage through files
and boxes, I nose about for treasure
as do the midwinter deer outside in a year
the oaks put out few acorns. I’d eat
the bark off a pine if I thought I’d find
beneath its tight inscrutable cover
a trace of your voice. I want to get through
winter, too—I’m simply an animal who
feeds on words, finding yours spilling into margins
balanced steeply on underlinings
many more crossed out in your rough-hewn drafts
I savor the words, listening for your voice
in a continuous, if tenuous, exchange . . .
I see it everywhere, exchange—nothing’s finished
I breathe out carbon dioxide, the summer oaks
take it in along with the sun, the leaves
power up, unfurl more leaves, give out oxygen
those doubled molecules I breathe in and in
without thinking much about it, but for
an occasional burst of gratitude
the sheer luck of being alive. Sheer . . .
A word so transparent, it might house spirit
the spirit I’d say, if I could make out
what it is. Up late, we’d often talk for hours
about a single word, a spirited exchange—
who knew where it would take us? And words
kept us close. But sheer’s partner is
stark, and together they make and unmake
treasure, pleasure, measure. What stays?
Firewood is a moment of being time, ash
also. Being time, we are like the shavings
that curled from the oak you planed into planks
to frame this house and lay the floors
Being time, we are whatever it is in us arises
meets, and merges into everything else . . .
Over the phone last night, your daughter
read me a letter you’d written her, found
tucked away in an old cardboard box
in the basement. Its subject:  How many
can we invite to the wedding? A question
of some urgency back then. A time of treasure
pleasure, measure. Hungrily, I listened
to your words in her voice. Gentle words, and
wise, as you traced in an eloquent narrative
your passage in time through hardship to an
exchange of love no numbers can tally. That was
a moment. That was a meeting . . .
Perhaps a life’s work is just this moment
just this much, breath shaped and released
given freely into the clear light . . . How many
can we invite to the wedding? All of it
is wedding—an exchange of words and sunlight
a moment of bud and blossom begun
in a rustle of leaves, a never-before-now
utterance suspended in sheer daring
the words shining, briefly held by who knows
what, before being swept once more
syllable by syllable, vowel by vowel
beyond the passion to endure, beyond
the passion not to be lonely, beyond
beyond, into the full and everlasting furl of silence

The Glass Globe

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

Wanting to begin again, a form of denial, I copy from a book
rearranging the words with a shaking hand . . .
This morning from where I sit, the rug is dark blue and burgundy
brighter where a length of full sun from the east window falls
On the shelf of the bay window a large glass globe, hand blown
the color of air over the shallows of the Sound summer mornings
shimmers, it all but floats . . . This morning, glad of it, I’m not going
anywhere, content as the globe fills with the quiet simplicity of light
This glass globe—it’s a made thing, a synthesis of sand and fire, air
and muscle and lung and tool, a flaring of energies joined
and transformed, and because of the quality of attention
that went into it, beautiful. And it rests in a precarious place
I have to move it as I open the windows. I shift it when I dust, and if
I’m not careful, my mood hard and angular, I may knock against it . . .
And this is history— this is prose. My prose, words
in a book now out of print, words underlined by my husband
whose hand now is ash in a wood-fired ceramic jar
Except for me, everyone who came to our wedding is
dead. I’m in another house now. The glass globe rests in another
morning’s light. Each morning, I walk out of this house to stand
alone in the quiet of these woods, whose leaf-rumpled
earth, so long ago now, was cleared and planted, grazed, hayed
harvested, abandoned—before that, scraped clean
by the sharp edge of the glacier; before that, marsh and sediment
before that, shoal and sea depth; before that, stone. When I take
my shoes off, my bare feet touch granite that was here
before leafy decay and woods-earth formed. Now I stand on it
shaken—I’ve done it, the fault is mine. I remember a Chinese sage
holding up a ceramic bowl, smaller than the globe in my window
but beautiful (therefore, the same—everything that partakes
of beauty is the same) and this gentlest of sages smiled as
he said, “The bowl is already broken.” And he meant, live with it
that way— love it, love it crazed
and cracked, love it broken. Because everything, everything
already is. Broken. And—was it moments ago? Dusting, I lifted
the glass globe, and when, even gently, I set it down, it cracked . . .
despite generations of care and abuse, it cracked, now
two fault lines rising from the base nearly to the lip, and here’s
the crazy miracle . . . it holds. It still holds. But do the math
estimate probability, run the numbers, run out of the house appalled,
then stand here, bare feet on raw granite, from which a whispered
certainty—“We’re done for”—rises razor-thin through flesh and bone
then lodges, a splinter of glass, in my throat . . .

Washing the Body

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

And last, we washed his body

Last, we rolled it to one side of the bed, rocked it gently back, the long

length of him settled now onto a clean sheet

Last, I followed a crease on his forehead with my finger

Last, his daughter washed his hair, massaging his scalp, sloshing

the soapy water

Last, his son sponged his shoulders

And I, each finger; he had beautiful hands

Last, his thighs, his knees, his shin blades

Last, we washed his feet, their soles a smooth new silk

And I for the last time his genitals, still warm as a woods-earth nestle

of wild orchids

His no-breath-now stayed sweet

Last, his eyebrows, bushy, outrageous, a fleck of water caught there

bright in the lamplight, as if a snowflake from a walk we took

years back across a white field had freshly fallen

I don’t know who crossed his arms across his chest

And last, he was warm when I kissed a mouth that would not close

nor speak, nor allow us to enter

the mystery of his being beyond us now, no crossing that threshold

And the silence in the room was, as it always is, ordinary and vast

Once

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

Once there were women who read books in trees.
I’ve heard it from their own lips,
these stories. And I was one of them.

I lay back in the Y-branch of a dogwood tree,
sun in the green leaves, a rain of petals
on the grass beneath me.

Once women washed in the watershed rainfall
of streams that tumbled down mountain
and into the plains below.

I knew a woman who dug herself a well, another
who raised rabbits, killed them clean,
skinned them as I might slip off a winter coat.

Once there were women who worked fields
in the hot sun and afterwards,
their work done, roamed the edges

where field met forest, where at sundown
the deer roused after dozing for hours
in the chicory and Queen Anne’s lace.

I know one woman who spoke her poems aloud,
standing at the edge of a field of tall grasses
so that the rabbits and the mice

and the red-tailed hawks could hear words on the wind.
She tells how lightning took down an oak
the way she’d take a lover.

Once there were women who fed themselves on roots,
who knew herbs and mushrooms,
simples and cures.

These days, if anyone thinks of these women at all,
it’s to dismiss them as primitive,
or pagan, or savage. . .

but I know how they held their bodies as they walked
their just once on this earth; how they wept
how they laughed; how they loved.

Once there were women who read books in trees,
and their minds and their bodies
were as pliant as salmon in a stream,

strong as the wolf tree maple at the edge of the field.
They belonged neither to fairy tale
nor myth. I knew them years ago.

They were my grandmothers. Praise them.

Memories of the Future “In the Market”

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

(excerpt)
. . .

like a gunshot. . . I was back in the Panteon
I’d toured with Edward, back with the dead.

I can’t think what made us go.
With the taste of coffee still in our mouths
we’d made love. With the straw pattern of the petate
imprinted on our skin, we’d washed in the sun.
Down the steps to the fusty vault, I felt his semen
leave me, wet on my thigh. Why would we have wanted
to see bones? That is, I’d expected bones,
not bodies warped in tight skins, in brown
naked hides. Not the scythe of grins, all flesh
made rind. And not the pod of a fetus with its empty
suck at a leathery breast. Edward said—
the ultimate still life, a monumental theme.
But I heard the baby smack its lips, and I fled.

I found myself in the market, touching onions one
by one. I traced silhouettes of shoots and calla stalks
on air, watched one bud split its caul and the white
spathe open. Cold, I let street life slip over me.
I searched each face, in each heard a dry, deathly
smack of the tongue. But I realized for the first time
power—the power to see a world buried in daylight.
I was a lens—and I saw.
There rose up for me
that day in Guanajuato’s streets the dead and the living—
they breathed through my breath, they rinsed through
my pores their blind needs. They were hands
scrubbing clothes, they gripped shovels
and newspapers, lifted cones of bananas, carried
crossbeams on their backs. They went down in the mine
to a source like their mother—they danced in the dust’s
brief abundance. Together they endured . . .

Out in the Open “Making Salad”

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

Out in the Open, “Making Salad”
after Eihei Dogen

I rub the dark hollow of the bowl
with garlic, near to the fire enough
so that fire reflects on the wood,
a reverie that holds emptiness
in high regard. I enter the complete
absence of any indicative event,
following the swirl of the grain,
following zero formal and immanent
in the wood, bringing right to
the surface of the bowl the nothing
out of which nothing springs.

I turn open the window above the sink
and see fire, reflected on the glass,
spring and catch on a branch a light
wind tosses about. Here or there,
between new leaves the Pleiades,
like jewels in the pleromatic lotus,
flash. I watch the leaves swirl
and part, gathering light fresh
from Gemini, ten millennia away,
fresh from Sirius—holding each burning
leaf, each jewel within whatever light
a speck of conscious mind can make,
unshadowed by reflection or design,

impartial. Out of the tap, from a source
three hundred feet down, so close
I feel the shudder in the earth, water
spills over my hands, over the scallions
still bound in a bunch from the store.
I had thought to make salad, each element
cut to precision, tossed at random
in the turning bowl. Now I lay the knife
aside. I consider the scallions. I consider
the invisible field. Emptiness is bound
to bloom—the whole earth, a single flower.

The Vigil “Lila”

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

(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 . . .

Earth Elegy “Resolutions”

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

I know what winter is, today
at least, out here
walking the ridge of quiet trees,
heavyhearted and close to
mistaking for grief this snow
on my eyelid. But enough—
I say the word aloud, as if it
were a prayer, and it floats off.
And if words are incense,
lasting only as long as
I believe in the next breath,
let me first take this breath—
that once was mist in a field,
vapor rising, whirled
by sun toward this snowfall
and magical air. Let me want
what I have, let me take
what is given to conjure with.
And when there is silence,
let me let silence be—as Keats
may have, once in Rome,
where he saw the ruined Colosseum
just as it was, transfigured,
made a trellis redly laden
with pomegranate trees at root
in the chinks of tumbled stone.
Perhaps he plucked one fruit and ate
the tart seeds out, black
and sweet enough, and spoke of it
to no one—why should he? the moment
full of its own juice, sweet
beyond tally or trace,
the martyrs and lions and spoiled
ladies long gone, the stones
simply there for him to harvest—
thrust and gnarl, slim trunk, branch
and fruit suspended in a soft wind
that may have, for all I know,
began when a star
collapsed, somewhere beyond Arcturus.

Icon and Evidence “Epistle to Gerard Manley Hopkins”

Posted on by Margaret Gibson

. . . 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.