Posthumous
Maggie Gibb, 1958-2002
I East End Eclogue
1
It was like uncovering the foundations of the world
And digging them up, one stone at a time making way
For the great stalks of summer: sunflowers and corn.
Like lifting bricks from a buried kiln, chips of plate,
Ballast from the hold of a ship, astonished by how far
The scattered cairn sunk beneath my shovel and bar.
2
Those days when she was pregnant and hungry
For the distant sun, my wife lazed in whatever light
She'd found would bathe the warm fleshly sculpture
Of her shoulders and breasts, canted pelvis, the great
Belly rounding like a boulder from the fertile earth —
One stone at a time, like touch- and blood- and birth-.
II Groundhog Distichs
A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse . . .
– Song of Solomon 4:12
Back here where she asked that her ashes be buried
Beneath the beams of cedar and rafters of fir,
For the second summer now it's plundered an entire crop
Of broccoli, leaving only the slavered stalks
And snapped-off leaves and sprung wires of the fence.
Next will be the Brussels sprouts and lettuce,
And the solace I've sought in growing things.
A crop of wrapped jade clouds, until this morning.
Beyond the stalks is a silk tree and the bench I made
Where she might sit in the feathery shade.
I'd banked the bed, hoed for grubs I might have missed.
My second summer without her come to this.
And here I'd hoped to heal myself with the small,
Careful gestures I could fence off from failure and loss.
III Specimen Days
1 Dwarfs & Bonsai: Japanese Courtyard
Phipps Conservatory
It has no garden, I remember, the heart
Of Rilke's dwarf. But here, among floral ships-
in-a-bottle, these buckled lovers stroll, arm
In arm, looking up at lap-top Cypress
And Chinese Elms, fruiting Pomegranate —
Trunks like twisted strands of mop or riddled
Coral stands, where boulders are gravel
And shrubbery clumps of moss. Rain's left puddles
Among them, ponds it's easy to imagine
Stocked with small red carp. Art or nature,
Which one holds the mirror? And what is meant
By full-blown here? Up the path, before
The stone pagodas where the dwarfs have stopped,
Sculpted water churns through rock.
2 Desert Storm, Metal Sculpture
Carnegie Museum of Art
In its flat, sectioned, Samurai plates, tail
Bent above it like a backhoe, the scorpion
Is still no match for the "single organism"
The ants become, even with one impaled
Upon its stinger. The swarm, configured here
In five soldered bodies and sets of prongs,
Bent-metal antennae, storms up the pincers
Off the marble floor: a pinioned throng
In this parable of battle, hardly more
Inanimate than insects seem for real — steel
Braised with copper, scorches from the torch.
After a few minutes, I can almost feel
The numb, going under of the scorpion,
The filings-to-magnet clamp of the ants.
3 Hornworms: Community Gardens
Homewood Cemetery
Plush, upholstered hungers slung along
The undersides of stems on which they hung
Feasting, we searched for them nightly,
Parting plants like waters, peering into that welter
For horned, green motley slashed with white
And serrated to their leaves.
They start from the eggs, from the earth,
Clutching their slow way upward, casting scat
Like round gray seeds out beneath the plants.
In another life these took flight on moth wings
Soft as twilights in which they sipped their nectars:
Sphinx, Hummingbird, Hawk . . . Here,
They're nearly chlorophyll where I pluck them
From trusses, crush them beneath the heel.
IV Moths
1
Morning, the brown moth mantling on the deck rail —
A fluttering slip of bark lifted from its tree.
From a distance it looks like petrified wood
Patterned with ochre and umber, the raw sienna stems.
Up close the wings seem plush, to drape in folds
Like nothing I can touch, nothing, these mornings,
I can even say, because even this is vocabulary,
moth and rust, a mummified pupa, borne aloft.
2
This morning I've been watching the wing patches,
Flat lime white, as they flash their semaphores
On the leafy air, and listening to the chirring sounds
These moths make in their mating flights,
Thinking once again of the funeral parlor: how there
Among the coffins and urns, I held her obituary,
Small and scissored as a swatch of cloth —
A garment, the psalmist says, fretted by moths.
V Wake
The friend who introduced us remembers
Her great torrent of black hair
And dazzling expression, that dance-class air
Masking her reserve. For another
It's our pasture garden and the Angelus
Of light around her
At the end of an August day. "The pick of the litter,"
I called her once, teasing. But she was.
Her slip shimmered on the bathroom door
Softly as the northern lights
That first summer I followed her footprints —
Gleaming parentheses — across the floor.
-- Robert Gibb, a good man.
Maggie Gibb, 1958-2002
I East End Eclogue
1
It was like uncovering the foundations of the world
And digging them up, one stone at a time making way
For the great stalks of summer: sunflowers and corn.
Like lifting bricks from a buried kiln, chips of plate,
Ballast from the hold of a ship, astonished by how far
The scattered cairn sunk beneath my shovel and bar.
2
Those days when she was pregnant and hungry
For the distant sun, my wife lazed in whatever light
She'd found would bathe the warm fleshly sculpture
Of her shoulders and breasts, canted pelvis, the great
Belly rounding like a boulder from the fertile earth —
One stone at a time, like touch- and blood- and birth-.
II Groundhog Distichs
A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse . . .
– Song of Solomon 4:12
Back here where she asked that her ashes be buried
Beneath the beams of cedar and rafters of fir,
For the second summer now it's plundered an entire crop
Of broccoli, leaving only the slavered stalks
And snapped-off leaves and sprung wires of the fence.
Next will be the Brussels sprouts and lettuce,
And the solace I've sought in growing things.
A crop of wrapped jade clouds, until this morning.
Beyond the stalks is a silk tree and the bench I made
Where she might sit in the feathery shade.
I'd banked the bed, hoed for grubs I might have missed.
My second summer without her come to this.
And here I'd hoped to heal myself with the small,
Careful gestures I could fence off from failure and loss.
III Specimen Days
1 Dwarfs & Bonsai: Japanese Courtyard
Phipps Conservatory
It has no garden, I remember, the heart
Of Rilke's dwarf. But here, among floral ships-
in-a-bottle, these buckled lovers stroll, arm
In arm, looking up at lap-top Cypress
And Chinese Elms, fruiting Pomegranate —
Trunks like twisted strands of mop or riddled
Coral stands, where boulders are gravel
And shrubbery clumps of moss. Rain's left puddles
Among them, ponds it's easy to imagine
Stocked with small red carp. Art or nature,
Which one holds the mirror? And what is meant
By full-blown here? Up the path, before
The stone pagodas where the dwarfs have stopped,
Sculpted water churns through rock.
2 Desert Storm, Metal Sculpture
Carnegie Museum of Art
In its flat, sectioned, Samurai plates, tail
Bent above it like a backhoe, the scorpion
Is still no match for the "single organism"
The ants become, even with one impaled
Upon its stinger. The swarm, configured here
In five soldered bodies and sets of prongs,
Bent-metal antennae, storms up the pincers
Off the marble floor: a pinioned throng
In this parable of battle, hardly more
Inanimate than insects seem for real — steel
Braised with copper, scorches from the torch.
After a few minutes, I can almost feel
The numb, going under of the scorpion,
The filings-to-magnet clamp of the ants.
3 Hornworms: Community Gardens
Homewood Cemetery
Plush, upholstered hungers slung along
The undersides of stems on which they hung
Feasting, we searched for them nightly,
Parting plants like waters, peering into that welter
For horned, green motley slashed with white
And serrated to their leaves.
They start from the eggs, from the earth,
Clutching their slow way upward, casting scat
Like round gray seeds out beneath the plants.
In another life these took flight on moth wings
Soft as twilights in which they sipped their nectars:
Sphinx, Hummingbird, Hawk . . . Here,
They're nearly chlorophyll where I pluck them
From trusses, crush them beneath the heel.
IV Moths
1
Morning, the brown moth mantling on the deck rail —
A fluttering slip of bark lifted from its tree.
From a distance it looks like petrified wood
Patterned with ochre and umber, the raw sienna stems.
Up close the wings seem plush, to drape in folds
Like nothing I can touch, nothing, these mornings,
I can even say, because even this is vocabulary,
moth and rust, a mummified pupa, borne aloft.
2
This morning I've been watching the wing patches,
Flat lime white, as they flash their semaphores
On the leafy air, and listening to the chirring sounds
These moths make in their mating flights,
Thinking once again of the funeral parlor: how there
Among the coffins and urns, I held her obituary,
Small and scissored as a swatch of cloth —
A garment, the psalmist says, fretted by moths.
V Wake
The friend who introduced us remembers
Her great torrent of black hair
And dazzling expression, that dance-class air
Masking her reserve. For another
It's our pasture garden and the Angelus
Of light around her
At the end of an August day. "The pick of the litter,"
I called her once, teasing. But she was.
Her slip shimmered on the bathroom door
Softly as the northern lights
That first summer I followed her footprints —
Gleaming parentheses — across the floor.
-- Robert Gibb, a good man.
