Jules Gibbs
POETRY MONDAY: August 3, 2009
Jules Gibbs’ poems have appeared in literary journals such as Spoon River Poetry Review, Salt Hill, Pearl and others, as well as in several anthologies. Twice the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for Poetry, she was awarded a Ucross Foundation Fellowship in 2007. This summer her poetry is accompanying a multi-gallery photography show of the work of Kevin O’Connell at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado. Further, we’ve just learned that Jules Gibbs has been selected by Kim Addonizio for inclusion in the annual anthology, Best New Poets, 2009, to be released this October by University of Virginia Press. This is an annual competition for poets without first books, and Gibbs was one of only fifty poets chosen nationwide.
Gibbs lives in Syracuse, New York, where she teaches at the Downtown Writers Center and also teaches poetry to children in the city public schools. The work the children produce under her tutelage is amazing – not only the original and heartfelt poetry they produce, but the quality of their discussion and understanding. Collaborating with a visual artist-teacher, she put together a small anthology of the children’s poems, called Born: Selected Poems and Artwork by the Fifth Graders of Franklin Magnet School of the Arts. “In their best writing,” she says, “they use language and metaphor in strange and surprising ways … and we catch a glimpse of the bright sparks of a unique and developing intelligence that stirs in their complicated minds. There are emotional truths in these poems.”
Certainly, the emotional truths in Jules Gibbs’ own poems will be apparent as well. Here, for your August pleasure, are three, appearing today for the first time.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
POSSUM
Alone again with my unborn child
or the unborn child of myself, I listen to the trouble
under the house, which comes in fits at dusk —
claws scratching in dirt for grubs.
My God, I think, she’s finally done it.
I name her still-blind babies for stars.
They are too many, the size of honeybees
clinging to her teats. Mine, she’s a girl
with curls and no name. She stomps a tantrum,
demands a place in all this stillness.
At least half of them will die.
If I die childless or grow into an old
child, so what? So I’ve no mouths to feed,
no mouths to tell post-mortem tales
about that trick where I play
dead, or what I know about how
not to mother — my one strong instinct
that lost a battle with another.
Who can say want for certain?
Lugubrious, tits aching, feeding no one
warm milk on no schedule – I conjure
swarms of hairless pink infants
asleep in phantom rooms upstairs, fists
clenching, star mouths sucking air.
Everything I never loved
has made itself at home.
THE INTRUDER
We never saw what circled our cabin each night —
some elusive, rabid thing, a mountain lion, fox,
or coyote —but we understood the sound it made —
a cry of sickness or sex, a phantom who hacked out
its tortured yapp from deep in the ravine,
then from somewhere up in the scrubby pines.
Sometimes it gave up the bark and just howled
across the frozen mountain, faded in the wind,
a kind of agitated silence we mistook for reprieve
only to reappear again, barking at the edge of the wood
not more than a few yards from our house. It startled
our shot nerves, resonated with the thing between us,
condemned us to live that winter like two
wounded animals. Too suspicious to sleep
we lashed out at each other, further injuring.
We were wrecked. What could we do but look out
into the black night, consider how it suffered,
alone, freezing, starving — if only it would die!
It worked its way into our dreams, curled up
like a thick swath of air, wedged a hoof
under the mattress, sunk a tooth in the pillow,
fixed an eye — until we gave up
and let its calling become our calling —
something for our own wild and dying thing to say.
BOY WITHOUT LANDSCAPE
Nineteen years in a coma and my son
wakes to say Mom. Or Maw, mow, on,
ohm, none —
He’d self-generated,
an emulation
of an emulation —
synthesizing white matter on the sly
until his axons fired: Mom.
Now, if only he could self-delight.
Mom as clone. Mom as currency. Mom as drone. Mom
as evidence: existence verified
as Mom, proving by disproving, Mom a category
where everything belongs to its own.
The thing is:
live.
Ma-ohm, Mom, maw.
But that is not
my son. Or an approximation of.
He does not ask me to tell stories
of yester-mornings and lasterdays, only lapses
into some default
for living, a chilly daydream
that vaults: Mom.
Mom as stone. Mom as micro-
environment. Mom iguana.
Three minutes without oxygen
and the imaginary landscape
stops believing in itself.
He went nine. But a thing
is not always undone by its opposite:
Mom as orange juice. Mom as discipline.
Mom, the study of how we study
how we live. Unmarriageable Mom, Mom.
Mom of the Big Boy, Poor Boy, poor
big boy, Mom. Poor spider’s silk.
Poor laser beam. Mom of Wow
— what to believe in now?