Poets in Montana with Montana Poet Laureate Mark Gibbons
Interview/Reading by Rick Newby, September 2022
Ten Quick Sketches
after Robert Harrison
for Wilbur & Susan, for Liz
“The satisfaction of small near things. . . .”
—V. S. Pritchett
Stones
burnished
black by
countless
human feet.
*
Why do we grow old?
*
Masonry wall
made of rough
rock & soft brick,
shards of tile
blue as this
placid sea.
*
Something marvelous
flickers, half-seen, above
the olive groves, the half-wild
vineyards, terraced to the sea:
a tower built
of nine essential
elements:
clay & water,
wool & blood,
wood & lime,
pitch, linen, & bitumen.
*
She floats
embraced by salt,
calm as the night air,
her hair cropped & glinting.
*
Why, as we age,
do we dessicate?
*
Feral cats
sleep on the verge.
This pebbled beach.
*
Her feet
glide,
skip,
stumble
up (&
down)
steep
stone
stairs.
*
Clliffside towns built
of stone and fired clay
fall steeply to
a sudden shore.
*
Rosemary trees line the quay,
broad-beamed boats bump
& rock, your form, so slim,
sunlit on slippery stone. Nothing
flawless in the world of men?
Manarola, Bay of the Poets, Ligurian Coast, May 2011
These Difficulties
The bird that cannot be countenanced or imagined is blue.
Let us rejoice that the bird is blue.
Not searing red or scandalous yellow or saintly black.
Leap to the constellations, shouts the bird,
her blue wings already climbing.
Dive in the fire, worship yourself
repeatedly, repeat after me:
There is nothing satisfactory in these dark times.
O she sang like a songbird or a blonde diva.
And a sun, lovely as her words, rose resplendent in the ebony sky.
Blue is not the only color.
Cerulean is not the only shade.
The letters are not broken anymore nor shattered by fate.
My grandfather loved birds before me.
These difficulties are painfully simple.
Early Portraits: Winter
for my parents
I could have taken this white dream.
Four feet of snow cut loose from the roof,
he smiles with his crosscut, alone,
sun edging through pines, his face burned
around dark glasses. But wait,
he is not alone. I spot gnomes among
the shingles, shoveling down great chunks.
Yet he still believes movement has cause
in physics. They laugh, beards dripping,
china pipes spiraling smoke like frost
into the low branches of a fir.
I understand now. They know his heart is strong,
that dark comes sudden and he must ski.
Two months before my sister, she kneels awkward
in her blue coat, arms thin as kindling.
The sled beside her is heavy with wood,
and in his harness the dog nudges her breast,
wanting to run. He is the zealot who corners
too fast, flinging logs into drifts deep
for marmots, waiting as, careful, she loads
the sled again. Thinking of her burden,
she forgets to call him mongrel and whistles
nursery tunes off-key. The dog sniffs a spruce
and lifts a leg, floating the Columbia
straight to the sea, her coat a blue torch
on either shore. She calls him—her dark child.
Packrat Knob
for Dale
The midden, riven with rivers of urine
(amberrat, it’s called), lies hidden
on the far side of this great stone
we dub the Knob. Screened by pines, among
crevices, the trade rats gambol, their shiny
booty colored by the amber streams,
hardened to “balls of a glistening substance”
resembling “variegated candy stuck together”
—the taste “sweet but sickish,” reported early travelers
gone seriously astray. With this trick, a urine
scarcely liquid, these rats retain every drop
of the moisture they need to thrive, here
in this land of little rain and blistering
summers where the sky spreads wide
over burnt hills and the creek, by
mid-July, dwindles to the barest trickle.
Rick Newby, Writer & Editor 