Green Linden Press

Winter Solstice

Zionsville, 1985

December: the tarnished silver of moonlight
Falling into the room, ghosting the chestnuts
Of hard coal in their hod beside the stove. 

I sit in the dark, slowly rocking, at a corner
Of the quartered year, while down in the folds
Of his blanket my son’s just opened his eyes.

He’s been whimpering softly in his sleep,
A sound as old as infant sorrow, and now
Lies quietly, watching as the world takes shape.

*

I don’t know what’s been troubling him,
Milky emulsions or the shadows from a dream.
Or whether his body’s thin new leaves

Have opened a little bit more. He’s nestled
Against my ribs, down where the breath-
Leavened body of the dust once parted

With a rib of its own—the start of that story
About innocence and how it comes to an end,
Like childhood, in the sexual flesh of the fruit.

*

The blanched lozenge of moonlight slanting
Across the floorboards, the heavens
Wheeling slowly overhead. I can almost feel

The raked coals settling in their ash-filled grate,
The solstice slipping into place once more
As the light starts back down the pathways,

The darkness giving way to the first hard frost
My son will watch burning off the windows,
Glazed panes filling with their own clear fire.

The Book of Days

i.
“The size of a lentil,” my friend’s wife told him,
Meaning the starting-point planted in her womb,
Its dot of genetic material. The cleaving
And long-division of that lens-shaped pulse,
And then its efflorescence.

ii.
                                                Small, bulbous,
Sluiced with blood, X and Y now either-or’d,
Ahead of the sunderings to come,
The fetus flickers on the ultrasound screen,
Its amped-up doppler heartbeats
Walloping out iambs in a line: I am, I am, I am . . .
The darkness divided by the light.

iii.
Trimestered nets of veins and nerve-ends.
The tally-stick chakras. The tongue-tipped thumb.
Cartilage knitting the soft cap of the skull.

iv.
And then that plash of broken water.

v.
Plate tectonics as the bones unlock,
The fetus socketed by the cervix
As the mother-mass clamps down.
Flesh’s tentative toehold, months ago,
Now fleshed out and hefted,
Wet lungs bellowed with the breath.

vi.
Winter’s child, tied up with a bow at the belly!
I like to imagine the first midnight feedings
Taking place in that high-ceilinged room
With its oak joists and rafters, snow on the roof,
And overhead, where the hounds follow Orion,
The great burning candles of the sky.

vii.
The birth cord like a rope bridge
Generations have swayed across.

Also by Robert Gibb: "Botanical Drawings," "Sparrows," "History of Abuse in Pennsylvania," "Addendum," "Diptych," "Pecking Order," "Chickadee," "Cardinal, Cardinal," "Work Song," "Water Garden: Lock & Dam"

Robert Gibb’s books include After, which won the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and Among Ruins, which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017. Other awards include a 1997 National Poetry Series title (The Origins of Evening), two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry and a Pushcart Prize. A new book, Sightlines, winner of the 2019 Prize Americana for Poetry, will be out early 2021.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020