Poems You Read Out Loud
Thomas Gibney
Scantily Clad Press, 2008
I followed the new moon and it led me to a garden. Not just any garden: there’s footpaths that wind and dogwoods that chatter and they open to a grove with the dark moon lighting it. It’s not there, but you know it’s there. I knew, for instance, there were apple trees— doubled over with shiny red earrings. A soft slithering in the grass. I look down to it, Is that you, snake? But it slithered on. I heard branches scrape, the dogwoods whinny, the lush night whisper that things were different now. There was a plate of stars, a faint chorus in the breeze,
and them glossy bulbs eyeing me. I sank my boy’s fang in and out!—came a pinwheel of lights. My hair loosed—locks fell. Rungs and rungs, they fall-so-pretty. A sun is what I saw. It peeked out a door. It peek out at me.
The Andes wear a jagged scowl. The brows are furrowed. Snow wedged between. Where are you, my love, hiding behind that wall? I woke up one morning from a long, deep sleep. I ate an apple and must have fallen in a valley, The mountains pitched between us. No telling’s what lies beyond them. That shiny red potion! It whisked me away— To the mountains, The city windows gaping, The smog like a grotesque body, Slumped over the valley, violating it. The mountains, They hug the city, They crowd against me, And I wail And I beat my fists on their chest, Their chest Which is hard and broad as a furnace When it sputters and glows in the winter sunset. My pale eyes scan the vault of the sky. My breath funnels out of me. Here’s a folk tale for you: The Andes are impassable in winter; Just yesterday, I met a hippie from Finland Who tried to reach Mendoza by bus with her mother, But got stuck fording an ice sheet. Why does everyone want to get out of this city? I still don’t know the fauna of Chile. Faces flutter past but
The Andes dig in their frown. Be sure, when springtime melts the snow from The mountains, my tracks Will be fresh in the soggy earth.
On a boat to Colonia, to Montevideo; one foot either side the Delta Paraná. I can acrobat across. Body is a triangle which isn’t Equilateral
My poetry gapes like the Lago Titicaca. The slivered shapes scalped like quinoa from the mountains. Little people tread on them— Little people tread around my poetry— and fish there.
Boulders yawn from the gums of the coastline. They sink, the dim shoal-ponds—foam eats them. Everything is seaswept. Mine are the eyes of the leaning to the window, mine is the casting of the heart amid their swirl (A dense sepulcher). The gulls peck at it. The fishermen net it. My shroud is gone.
Emily, in Bolivia they bury llama fetuses under the new houses to bless them. What will we plant under ours when we finally live together?
So I went to the bruja, and what she told me: ten thousand things, not least that I was clairvoyant and something of a witch myself. Um, poetry? What does this mean, please? And not to forget that Emily needed to know, “I love you!”—Take my word for it, Em! and understand— when summer comes to South America, the heart might lead me to God knows what, the llamas, a beautiful Argentine with hair like black jaguar fur, or any other kind of locura in Rio. She told me too (the bruja I mean) that I’d need at some point or another to cut it off with you, take time to do some drugs or something, but not to worry! Wasn’t it you who told me monogamy was a socially-constructed phenomenon? Besides, I’ve come too far not to believe in witches. I’ve got to follow that new moon I keep seeing in my dreams, like some god’s planted it there. I’ve got to ask the cosmic serpents, how many bites to the center of the apple, and exactly how many neighborhoods
fit in it? One thing’s for certain: I can’t leave here without finding that giant she-spider with her nasty, orangish bluish legs, the one I threw rocks at as a kid to knock her down from her goopy silk-trussed web. I see her from a distance now, a gross, angelic being crouched on a precipice somewhere in the Misty Mountains— and I try to holler, “Sorry!” but as soon as I utter it she scuttles away, into one million morbid caves and a labyrinth of stalactites, doused in a licorice black so thick no hobbit would enter, if it weren’t for the goblins. To clarify, the world is so miserably oppressive, at times. Everyone I meet is so goddamn sure of themselves. I hope this hag is right, I hope convoys of jaguars for my caravans. Seriously, what does it take to get some caramelos around here?! Emily, I know what you’re thinking— I’m delusional, self-prophetizing, I’ve gone and done it this time! But come on— It wouldn’t be so bad to lose my mind. Who decides what’s normal these days? The words are what I’ve got. My mantras, my sacred dance with myself, my syllables to wrap around you— how else can I
keep you? but with the usuals: Thank you, I love you, take care, por fa-vor!
I was alone, so I picked a vine I gnawed it down I grated the flesh I culled the emerald cellulose why else was I doing here here in the forest this is not me remembering the forest black with its ink-black patches pooling and giant spiders pouncing should you wander from the trail I wandered from the trail there were some fine stalks there I set my teeth blade-edge down on them they gave I ground up these tough tongues like spoons gnarled one upon another on the trees the fat trees the soft trees the trees that punctuate the black furlong these trees which I’d found myself among I was alone
Under the canopy, my yellow eyes chop the night’s cloak. I’m in the selva. I dig among the blood-sounds. I dig among the selva. My earth-hum pitters. The black fur ribbons like honey off the comb.
In the dark of the jungle no gardens exist if all that exists is gardens / you can’t find gardens nestled in selfsame gardens. I drag along so alone in no particular garden. The jungle is dense and light is cruel.
I’m most alone when I lay in my bed, Wrapped in a chrysalis of lurid sleep, And I tightrope through the silver Leaves of dreams— A maple tree, Where I see your imploring smile, The dew-colored petal of your hand outlined Against the blurred silhouette of the caterpillar’s thread. I feel you draw near to me, But I don’t feel you, exactly. I see you touch my icy cocoon But I’m not there, or I don’t know it’s you that’s calling, “Open sesame!” and I stir and twitch in my sleep But I can’t wake up. Now, my eyes Are stitched fast with silk, I grope along the treacherous heights, I feel for you Frantically. I move in darkness and the early spring cold. It’s then I come upon an oblong disk, Lured by your lingering specter of a touch— I can sense your smell that’s clung to it— And I paw around the cracked clay of its shell.
The new moon dons a pockmarked eye. Idiot veil, I know your tricks! I forget what’s a dream. Time? Metaphysics? I wander the streets. Just what are the stained glass fragments of sounds, other than assaults on my quietness? Avenida 9 de Julio’s the broadest in the world. Somewhere there’s a milonga where a man and woman press their hot bodies together like papier-mâché. He dips his torso to hers like a flower bowed by the wind. In the city you can float like smoke and no one will even know you’re there.
A honeysuckle off the vine won’t thrust me back in your hollowness. So go. Don’t leave. Just don’t. Look. My squeamishness is a novel quality. Salt-thick nights on the Palermo din work my heart like an accordion. Sooner or later I’ll be back to you. (This is why I invented the smile.)
The literary canon’s replete with analogy equating every new birth to a spring. In South America Decembers are fertile. Last summer we stood back to back on the porch and you got out a yardstick, or so I dreamt. Did you laugh at Aristophanes’ idealism in Symposium? When gods get jealous they strike our faces in two. The Magellanic rue in her flurried. In Florida don’t the colors craze about now? Or am I confusing the swirl of the seasons, the Januaries bereft of snow, drab July thick with tiny nibs of cold. When I die, wanting vials of smells to open. Before the last breath: the one with seashore caught. The one of sex. The Emily’s flesh. I run around like I’ve lost the skin off my back. The prickling air fingers me through and through. Fat winds disparage me. The hemispheres are swapped.
I gather all the sadness of the world to my heart. It plumes there, grows there, it draws me in and I love its wet shrill. Its clammy stretch. My sadness, when I’m alone with it, it spills: cold sun over boulders in the plain, sweet gum on the leaf unclenched by the rain. The end is something crystalline.
Saudade the letter to Emily goes like this: Hello, love! Is it cold in Florida yet? It’s been too long, I can’t remember. These days, I occupy myself with Šalamun, chirimoya, and the bask under the apricot tree. Which reminds me, did you ever read about that Norwegian who swam the whole length of the Amazon? They had to trail slabs of liver behind him to keep off the piranhas. Can you imagine such pure dissolution? What I’m saying is I’m songless again. I look for you in the mountains. Under rocks, under stews. You’re not there, no more than that new moon is there. They become you, they become my poetry. I talk to the animals. They eat up all your shine. My metaphors are tired, I know. But they’re there!
My loneliness against the quill of loneliness… I’m never so alone as when I’m with you— I’m never so myself as when I’m with you! And when I talk to you, when I murmur in the lush of night to you, it’s really to the both of you, to the sun that eludes me, the filete flourish, the girl with the face of the Virgin Mary— the picture you sent me is the inspiration for this poem, by the way! I’ll call it “Emily in Lotus”. Really, how do you do it, sitting cross-legged like that? I could never get them down as far as yours. The limber one, always one step ahead of me. Oh, my love…where are you now? Alone and pensive as always? Sipping your almond-chocolate martini or something? Think of me, will ya!
I saw the poem before the poem saw me. The gold sun. The in a door. The frail tendrils peeking out of it. The murmur is there for suffusing, I heard. I devoured its song. The same song Neruda heard— that necromancer— how should I explain this? Us poets are the ones that turn trolls into stone. There’s not some moment when it just lifts you up from your toadstool and makes you tall. To get out of Mirkwood you sardine yourself in a barrel, and then—down the river! This is how it is. I dig these gardens. The sun is sometimes there.
Thomas Gibney is 22 years old. He performs his poetry to music and spoken word. Emily Frances took this picture.