The Glass Globe

Poems

Margaret Gibson

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807175903
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Mujeres en la poesía

Winner of the Connecticut Book Award for Poetry With The Glass Globe, celebrated poet Margaret Gibson completes a trilogy distinguished by its meditative focus on the author's experience of her late husband's Alzheimer's disease. In this new collection, she blends elegies of personal bereavement with elegies for the earth during the ongoing global crisis wrought by climate change. Gibson's poems personalize the vastness of climate catastrophe while simultaneously enlarging personal grief beyond the limits of self-absorption. A work of great compassion and vision, The Glass Globe is a necessary, heartbreaking book from one of our most compelling poets.

WING

How it was severed, or if it was sheared off

I don’t know—

nor

how long it lay in the path the mower had

already made

through the thick field of tall grasses, chicory

and thistle

But if the body, as it rots, loosens its bindings

and its grasp

if it opens its sheath

then perhaps my neighbor, who chanced upon it

simply lifted the owl

by one wing, and the rest of it, the core, fell away

as a ripened fruit falls to earth when it’s ready

I have learned to listen to the word inside a word

as if it is

the whisper I need to hear

Inside flower

flow

inside seclusion

clue

inside heart

the art of listening

All winter, while the one wing

aired in the woodshed

and the lingering odor

faded

I kept silent

until, inside not knowing

a wing

began to rustle

began to throb

began to stir

I had a friend who believed in not knowing

so deeply

he understood

the lie inside believe

the pin in happiness

the suffering in paragon

And yet he believed

his body

had betrayed him—one illness, then

another, his body only falling

apart—

he believed that, and he wanted

off the waterwheel

that turns the river of life, he wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Washing the Body
• How It Is
• Moment
• Panang Curry with Shrimp and Gustav Sobin
• Long Division
• Grief and the Art of Archery
• Waiting
• Scrolls
• Mountain Koan
• Slowly
• Deliberate and a Little Stern
• Looking Back, Looking Now
• What He Knew
• The Glass Globe
• Riverkeeper
• Resilience
• Reflection, Looking Straight Ahead
• Greed
• Asides and Notations
• Sky Pond Place
• Cloud Koan
• Solving for the Root
• Butternut Squash Heart Sutra
• White Phlox
• Like So Much Weather
• Because the Earth
• Exchange
• Wing
• Judge Not
• Never Pitiless Enough or Kind
• The Keep
• When Everything Broken Is Broken
• One Hour
• Star Koan
• This Morning
• Tiger, Tiger
• Intimacy
• Grace
• Always an Immigrant
• Irrevocable
• Notes