Embers
only. A good pile with a peak rising in expectation of more
lava about to erupt from below. Soundless beckoning. Slowly
someone is drawn down from her homework, a paper on Erikson's
dichotomy between self-absorption & generativity; the other,
also a teenager, concerned with nail polish covering nubbins
she's unable to keep out of her mouth; & their mother, after
hours on the computer. Slowly, they congregate, languorously
together, felines, the embers' high-pitched wail a loose tom
behind a wall. Supine, prone, bodies sideways, pillows, throws,
pure Egyptian joy to watch the tactile stroking of foreheads
forearms neck. Sparks give way to darkness. The youngest gets
off the floor hoping for a phone call. The scholar goes off
hoping for an insight into self-examination. Although the mother,
lonely, unadorned, far from abandoned, struggles up to bed,
something of her remains at the edge of the hearth, until the
embers turn to ashes, & again, her recollection metamorphoses
them into snow.
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Once the sacred character of the body
is recognized the cosmos wheels into line. - Henry Miller
Wind
pushing light all over the place outside. Cold, another wall.
Physicists now say the universe is limitless, all theory must
be reformulated. Talk which ignores the substantive core of
the human body is useless. Recently I picked up a book of
anatomy illustrated limb by limb, organ by organ, with color
photographs. It's a complex, horrid mass of cells after the
living skin is gone. When are you coming up to bed?
Robert
Gibbons has had five chapbooks since 1980, including OF DC,
published in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, who designed
the cover. Guy Davenport responded to the book, "It is
admirable & astonishing." Sam Hamill, in a review
in Bookways, wrote, "Anyone familiar with Thelonius Monk's
music cannot help but hear the quirky syncopations of Gibbons's
mind fitting perfectly with those of the pianist." He
spent a good portion of 2000 on a prose poem project "which
I've tracked online in two columns in a little e-zine out
of Switzerland."
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