Robert Gibbons

 

Events Where They Should Be

You'll find few events where they should be: in books. It's snowing. I go out of the library without coat, hat, gloves, & stand there watching it cut through a minor stand of city pines, envelop rhododendrons underneath. Crowds pass by without a second glance. Most expressions bear this look: snow's a nuisance. Suddenly a tall African man stands right in front of me. It's Oyetokunbo, a young man I know from Nigeria, asking what I'm doing. "Enjoying the snow," is something he says he's never heard of before, walking off shaking his kerchiefed head incredulously like an oak dancing against a Northeast wind.

 

Zen February: Coltrane Piece

One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here. -Amiri Baraka

That fine orgasmic tone, that screechy, animal timbre of terror & potency, percussive bloodlines, sonic knivings, guttural cuts, the great place the throat can summon the soul up from, & the ultimate rancor of death. Coltrane's heart, lung, pain, on the last Paris tour in '65 with Jimmy Garrison arcing bow across bass for angular sound on Blue Valse as well as any Casals or Ma. Jazz history has Elvin Jones storming off stage, angry, emptying a trunk full of drum paraphernalia onto the floor as if it were War. Garrison improvising cover. John Cage said he'd be content with black rectangles & squares, provided Rauschenberg painted them.

 

Parallel Lines

The last day of Summer slipped by almost unnoticed, muggy, rain, little light at all, thoroughly uninviting. Just when I'm about to give up on any solace coming from the Equinox, Murat stops by asking me to join him & a few of his friends for Turkish tea. He wonders why I've never heard of it, calling it famous, served in small metal cups with handles, adding in a waving gesture of parallel, meandering lines, "In the shape of a woman," quickly walking away. At midnight, an hour before the astronomical change, a breath of cool air courses through our bedroom window. By morning two crows land in tandem at the base of the last letter of the "YMCA" sign on Huntington Avenue. This new season will begin by imagining black-winged guardian figures carved above the workshop entrance of ancient craftsmen, recently unearthed at Aphrodisias, in Anatolia.

 

Close Reading

Bone, skin, teeth, hair, all about to fall down or out. The rest of the organs comporting themselves as if age were extraneous. Opposing someone's gossip, or whispers of their weekly book club, I'm lining up my great ones: Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Rilke, to see the relevance they give fracture, wrinkle, ache, loss, in a larger scheme of things. It's close to an exhumation, reading the lips of the dead, their final sighs, last articulations of life. What I've gotten from them so far is that ink & blood are nearly equal.

 

Portrait, after Rilke

If indifference is a luxury, he can afford only the briefest reverie, a blink, nothing more extended. A bevy of ancestors congregating behind the intensity of eyes. The camera caught it all. Survivor of wars, evident in scars. Sex is there, streaming from below. The whole body welling up: rhythmic lung; liver pushed to the brink; thorax & torso nothing short of voracious; heart, sturdy as a stone mason, or as compassionate as a French grandmother after midnight mass, or occasionally, ruthless as father's. Knowledge appears at the level of the simplicity of work, complexity of words. Living spent in the realm of pure moment. The lens summed it up in an instant. An intuitive, tactile nature, ready to form yet another sentence, as if later, death will still be articulate.

 

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