Dobby Gibson

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GONE BEFORE

Sadness, though your beard may be fake,
your anonymity is quite real,
whispered the dying man to his nurse,
raising his arms for his last sponge bath.
Early renderings had no vanishing point.
Painters dream in oil.
Dreams, like canaries,
are sent down into our mineshafts
to discover how long we might survive,
the dreamers, like secretaries,
are sent home in sneakers,
carrying their pumps.
Sadness, you are so Japanese: snow
on just one side of the leaf
that has not yet dropped.
Snow of all snow
and of every lost chance,
last insects walking in fear across glass,
zeppelin beacons pulsing through the fog.
Snow as illegible as the cardboard
held by the man who can’t spell
how hungry he is,
kneeling frozen at the fountain
to sail a small boat
folded from his last dollar.
Seen from deep orbit, hearts
wink white with loneliness.
A mother pulls her daughter by her arm.
A little girl pulls her doll by its hair.
Inside the space capsule after splashdown:
nothing. Not even a note.
The hospitals they have built
just for people like us to die in
are built entirely of corridors,
which they keep empty,
except for a grinding light.
Outside, the snow falls without making a sound.
And still the dogs scatter.

OPEN SEASON

1.
It may be true that everything
has already been said,
but it’s just as true that not everyone
has had a chance to say it.
A man walks into a bar.
The sunlight lies in measured lengths.
The afternoon stares right through you
in disbelief like the secretary
who you know never liked you,
as if forever waking from some dream
and being unhinged by the realer thing:
sometimes you, sometimes her, always this world
in which rock n’ roll is dying yet another death
in front of children who will realize it
only after it’s too late,
then spend the rest of their lives
pretending it turned out otherwise.
There is a way to explain
such things best by demonstrating
how they should never be done,
as if every life were lived in a second language,
hoping one another out of our mistakes
and toward another meal
even as we stare into the bathroom mirror
to rehearse the day’s lies,
just as the face of every astronaut best records
the reflection of his own photographer,
more surprised than anyone
to find himself there,
standing on the moon.

2.
If everything has already been said,
then, so far, few appear to have been listening.
There isn’t any part of “no”
that we have ever understood.
A hint of the invalidity, perhaps,
but only in a blousy kind of way,
the radio dreaming in static,
mothers pushing strollers
through the heat in a sadness
we have yet to invent a greeting card for.
Light teaching us
what we never seem to learn:
sudden sparrow on the fencepost
and then just rain there,
no more bugs dying in our wine.
What of this surprise of sunlessness
is the souvenir that we leave with?
To look is to bear how close
we have come to being overcome-
by the distance, by these stars,
charted as if they were ours,
sky laundered breezily, a new light of shade,
one day running into another
like two friends who can’t admit
how much they can’t stand one another’s wife.
Beneath the alien cloud-wander,
murmurous inclinations, thoughts quickly brushed off
like the ash from your pants
at a party you prayed never to end,
lights so unexpectedly low,
fluttering in tandem in the silence
of the very square they form,
as captive to the passage
as they are undefeated by night.

3.
It’s true that at this time of year,
it’s already been said
that it’s all downhill from here.
One needn’t hang around long to discern
the manner in which a steady inattention
to the hum can melt
into a thrumming kind of somnolence,
but we’ve drafted entire evacuation plans
for lesser emergencies than these,
and the directions still fail us.
As if just some trees could ever be enough,
when we’re left here,
among our friends, already missing them,
hoping for what we know
won’t be around for long:
flowers, or even just the smell of them.