,,,,,
Wordlessly you insisted on your aloneness and you never seemed to allow yourself to acknowledge what your own body, your own spirit, might confess to thinking, morning, afternoon and night.
And night—when you cried out sometimes from within your bad dreams.
Somewhere else, reflected in slow bayous and rivers, were planets and stars.
Even as I began, when still a child, to sense what our mutual thinking felt like in my anxious gut, I still could not let go of what your being said to me without your having to say it, without you being able to say it. Certainly not wanting to say it. Yet I heard it.
Which is why now I can’t help wanting to tell you something that you’ll hear only inside me, where you can’t hear it, but my sometimes dim and sometimes blinding projection of you still lives:
from your example, maybe, I built my own interior of protected places.
But that seemed to give me the sense that you were inescapable. Which was certainly not ideal, but at the same time I had—I have—to admit to myself that although I had once been inside you and came out, you are still in me, even now.
,,,,,,
This excerpt is from the book THREE POEMS by Reginald Gibbons (Finishing Line Press), and is available at THREE POEMS by Reginald Gibbons https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/three-poems-by-reginald-gibbons/
THREE POEMS includes a reminiscence and imagining of my mother’s life when she was young, and later (“Mōdor: An Elegy”); the poem “Mother Tongue” is a romp—satirizing with energetic language the purveyors and accomplices of lies, rage, aggression, sedition, uprisings, illegality, fanaticism, and toadyism; “Elegy” is an interweaving of the story of a friend of my youth who died too young—a narrative in fragments that are interleaved with short passages from Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a book that my friend and I found dazzling, strange, daring, inventive, unpleasant, very wrongheaded, and (poetically/artistically) unprecedented.
Reginald Gibbons was born in Houston and grew up there. His novel Sweetbitter won the 1995 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Jess Jones Award for Best Novel, and was reprinted in paperback by Penguin, and then by LSU Press, and again in 2023 by JackLeg Press. Gibbons’ two books of short/”flash” fiction are Five Pears or Peaches (out of print) and An Orchard in the Street (BOA Editions, 2017). He has published eleven books of poems, including Creatures of a Day (LSU), which was a Finalist for the National Book Award, and has won other awards, as well as writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and a Fulbright fellowship (Spain).
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