Sheet Music

Robert Gibb

• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781637680476
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Gibb's second Autumn House Poetry collection, he finds sublime music in everyday city life. He offers a roadmap to hear the music of life and nature within the context of an industrial setting.

I

KITES

Come March we’d find them

In the five-and-dimes,

Furled tighter than umbrellas

About their slats, the air

In an undertow above us

Like weather on the maps.

We’d play out lines

Of kite string, tugging against

The bucking sideways flights.

Readied for assembly,

I’d arc the tensed keel of balsa

Into place against the crosspiece,

Feeling the paper snap

Tautly as a sheet, then lift

The almost weightless body

Up to where it hauled me

Trolling into the winds—

Knotted bows like vertebrae

Flashing among fields

Of light. Why ruin it

By recalling the aftermaths?

Kites gone down in tatters,

Kites fraying like flotsam

From the tops of the trees.

NESTS

1. Art Installation, Regent Square

The next day they were all in place,

Mounted and out-of-context:

Six cup nests of songbirds,

Each centered within a Lucite box

Cinched halfway up its tree.

And stretched beneath each nest,

A bar like a level, balancing

Dish-shaped feeders at either end.

The whole art spoke precision

Like that of Joseph Cornell,

Or the cases of wing-pinned insects

On display in the museum.

A world of thatch and plastic,

Carefully composed.

But beyond the cooped baskets

Is where the green limbs rose.

2. Gradeschool Exhibit, Carnegie Library

Pipe cleaners and paper

And raddled twigs—the grebe’s nest

Floats on its shelf

As though woven to the waters

Its maker felt lapping about it,

Afternoons in the classroom,

Plaiting sea-green confetti

And pliant strands

Into make-shift weeds and grasses,

Hooping the first horizon

The nestlings would know.

A fourth-grade project

In habitable forms, the way

They fashion the world

As we go, learning

The various grammars for home.

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

1. The Nestling

Already the ants are working their intricacies

Upon it, world without end.

They unburden the bones which were only

The barest of reeds to begin with,

They rinse themselves in the light

And hurry on. There is no mystery for them

In the unfinished body with its gummed wings

And few feathers and dangling limp feet.

The bird is simply another thermal of the source

They spend themselves uncovering.

And I, who am loathe to hold it in my hands,

What right have I to quarrel

With any of heaven’s precise, cold terms?

Or any of the earth’s?

2. Waking at Night

All night I tossed fitfully as one whose sleep

Was a passage to the same bad dream

That set my flesh crawling, the smallest motes

Of moonlight falling through the screen,

And then beyond it to where my father lay

As evening filled his room, the faint ants spilled

In endless waves out across the ceiling.

Figments of his shadows, he watched them

Swarm from the curtains, the seams of light

In the blinds, pouring upside-down around him,

Covering his sheets like wrinkles he kept trying

To smooth. Nor could anything but sleep

Soothe him, no matter what measures we used

To chase the small hoards from his sight.

Now, tossing awake all night, the pale motes

Of moonlight sifting about me

As if littering my sleep, I kick loose the covers

To see if my sheets are swarming for real,

Or whether I’ve only been dreaming again

Of my father, whose room grew dark

That evening when bits of the night came in.

3. Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt, Carnegie Museum

Feted and caulked, wound with strips

Of swaddling, the blunt Egyptian body

Lies bundled in its stiff shreds as in mache,

As though death might be finessed

The way life was not, and this vessel

Drifting on the waters of the dead—

A trenched bed eddying into your sight.

And in the display case beyond it:

The inlaid lid of a coffin blooming

With spectral flowers, the hawk-faced god

Fired in clay, and the chiseled ankh,

And the dry, meticulous veins . . .

Everything but the gold the great ants roll

From the underworld, the scarab beetle

That pushes up the disk of the su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Music Lesson
• I
• II
• III: Sheet Music
• IV
• V
• Acknowledgments
• Notes