"Poems You Read Out Loud" by Thomas Gibney

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Poems You Read Out Loud Thomas Gibney

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A Scantily Clad Press E-chap

Transcript of "Poems You Read Out Loud" by Thomas Gibney

Page 1: "Poems You Read Out Loud" by Thomas Gibney

Poems You Read Out Loud

Thomas Gibney

Scantily Clad Press, 2008

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I followed the new moonand it led me to a garden.

Not just any garden:there’s footpaths that windand dogwoods that chatterand they open to a grovewith the dark moon lighting it.It’s not there, but you

knowit’sthere.I knew, for instance,there were apple trees—doubled overwith 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

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and out!—came a pinwheelof lights. Myhairloosed—locksfell. Rungs and rungs, they fall-so-pretty.A sun is what

I saw. Itpeeked out adoor. It peek out at me.

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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 wailAnd I beat my fists on their chest,Their chestWhich is hard and broad as a furnaceWhen 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 FinlandWho 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 butThe Andes dig in their frown.Be sure, when springtime melts the snow fromThe mountains, my tracks

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Will be fresh in the soggy earth.

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On a boatto Colonia, toMontevideo;one footeither sidethe DeltaParaná.I can acrobat across.Body isa trianglewhich isn’tEquilateral

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My poetry gapes like the Lago Titicaca.The slivered shapesscalpedlike quinoafrom the mountains.Little people tread on them—Little people tread around my poetry—and fish there.

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Boulders yawn from the gums of thecoastline. They sink,the dim shoal-ponds—foam eats them.Everything is seaswept. Mineare the eyesof the leaning to thewindow, mine is the casting ofthe heartamid their swirl (A dense sepulcher). The gulls peck atit. The fishermennet it. My shroud is gone.

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Emily, in Boliviathey bury llama fetusesunder the new housesto bless them. What will we plant under ourswhen we finally live together?

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So I went to the bruja, and what she told me:ten thousand things,not least that I was clairvoyantand 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 jaguarfur, or any other kind of locura in Rio.She told me too (the bruja I mean)that I’d need at some point or anotherto cut it off with you,take time to do some drugs or something,but not to worry! Wasn’t it youwho told me monogamywas a socially-constructed phenomenon? Besides,I’ve come too far not to believe in witches.I’ve got to follow that new moon I keepseeing in my dreams, like some god’splanted it there. I’ve got toask the cosmicserpents, how many bitesto the center of the apple, and exactly howmany neighborhoodsfit in it?One thing’s for certain:I can’t leave here without finding

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that giant she-spider withher nasty, orangish bluish legs,the one I threw rocks at as a kid toknock her down from her goopysilk-trussed web.I see her from a distance now,a gross, angelic being crouchedon a precipicesomewhere in the Misty Mountains—and I try to holler, “Sorry!”but as soon as I utter itshe scuttles away,into one million morbid cavesand a labyrinth of stalactites,dousedin a licorice black so thickno hobbit would enter, if it weren’tfor 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 jaguarsfor 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 mymind. Who decides what’s normalthese days? The wordsare what I’ve got. My mantras, my sacreddance with myself,my syllables to wrap around you—how else can Ikeep you? but with the usuals:Thank you, I love you, take care, por fa-vor!

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I was alone, so I picked a vineI gnawed it down I grated the flesh I culled the emerald cellulosewhy else was I doing herehere in the forest this is not me remembering theforestblack with its ink-black patches poolingand giant spiders pouncing should you wander from the trailI wandered from the trailthere were some fine stalks thereI set my teeth blade-edge down on them they gaveI ground up these tough tongues like spoons gnarled oneupon another on the trees the fat treesthe soft trees thetrees that punctuate the blackfurlong these treeswhich I’d found myself among I was alone

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Underthe canopy,my yellow eyeschop thenight’s cloak.I’m in the selva.I dig among the blood-sounds.I dig among the selva. Myearth-hum pitters.The black furribbonslike honeyoff thecomb.

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In the dark of the jungle no gardensexist if all that exists is gardens / you can’t find gardensnestled in selfsame gardens.I drag along so alone in no particular garden.The jungle is dense and light is cruel.

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I’m most alone when I lay in my bed,Wrapped in a chrysalis of lurid sleep,And I tightrope through the silverLeaves of dreams—A maple tree,Where I see your imploring smile,The dew-colored petal of your hand outlinedAgainst 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 cocoonBut I’m not there, or I don’t know it’s you that’s calling,“Open sesame!” and I stir and twitch in my sleepBut I can’t wake up. Now, my eyesAre stitched fast with silk,I grope along the treacherous heights,I feel for youFrantically.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.

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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 arethe 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 milongawhere a man and womanpress their hot bodies togetherlike papier-mâché.He dips his torso to hers like a flower bowed by the wind.In the city you can float like smokeand no one will even know you’re there.

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A honeysuckle off the vine won’t thrust me backin 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 heartlike an accordion.Sooner or later I’ll be back to you.(This is why I invented the smile.)

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The literary canon’s replete with analogyequating every new birth to a spring.In South AmericaDecembers are fertile.Last summer we stood back to back on the porchand you got out a yardstick, or so I dreamt.Did you laugh at Aristophanes’ idealism in Symposium? When gods get jealousthey strike our faces in two.The Magellanic rue in her flurried.In Floridadon’t the colors craze about now? Or am I confusingthe swirl of the seasons,the Januaries bereft of snow,drab July thick with tiny nibs of cold.When I die, wanting vials of smellsto open. Before the last breath: the onewith seashore caught. The one of sex. The Emily’s flesh.I run around like I’ve lost theskin off myback. The prickling air fingers me throughandthrough.Fat winds disparage me. The hemispheres are swapped.

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I gather all the sadness of the world to my heart.It plumes there, grows there, it draws me inand 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 gumon the leaf unclenched by the rain. The end

is something crystalline.

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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 underthe apricot tree.Which reminds me, did you ever readabout that Norwegian who swamthe whole length of the Amazon?They had to trail slabs of liver behind himto 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 morethan that new moonisthere. They becomeyou, they become my poetry.I talk to the animals. They eat up allyour shine. My metaphorsare 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!

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And when I talk to you,when I murmurin 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 meis 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 onestep 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!

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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 onesthat turn trolls into stone.There’s not some moment when it just liftsyou upfrom your toadstool and makes you tall.To get out of Mirkwoodyou sardine yourself ina barrel, and then—down the river! This is how it is. I dig

these gardens. The sun is sometimesthere.

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Thomas Gibney is 22 years old. He performs his poetry to music and spoken word. Emily Frances took this picture.