Robert Gibb


Poem Beginning with Capa’s Falling Soldier


The shutter has severed the instant
In which he’s been knocked off his feet,

Falling as if threshed, back toward
The Spanish earth his blood will darken

One small part of, “Viva la Muerte”
The motto of the men who shot him.

Trampled grasses in the depth of field.

Since then, it’s been gospel on the Right
That the photograph was staged—

As though fact were the only ground
On which truth might make a stand.

*

And art? I wonder what they’d make,
If anything, of Motherwell’s elegies

To the Spanish Republic, the great black
Memorial forms he returned to

Over the years (thinking at first, 
He said, of dead testicles in a bullring).

Black-and-white’s life-and-death.

Wonder what they’d make of the blood
Lorca sent singing from the corrida,

Out across the marshlands and fields.
The paintings the flags of that country.

Negative Dialects


after Adorno


It must be winter, evening, since the lights
Are on already in the living room.
Since I’m not yet three it must be near
My bedtime, a motherless child,
Like in the lament, cared for by my godparents.
Tonight, instead of the usual storybook,
A board game lies open before us,
Its switchbacks sectioned like a sidewalk  
From the front of Uncle Wiggily’s bungalow.
Five hops, or jumps, if you prefer,
And then look back to where you were.
I can still see that big top-hatted rabbit
Kicking up his heels on the front of the box,
His name the same as the game’s.
The version we’re playing was a gift
For their son on one of his birthdays,
Years before he joined the ranks of the dead
During the Second World War.
That’s him in uniform in the photograph
They’ve enshrined on their mantle,
His name the same as mine.
Uncle Wiggily goes ahead by ten.
Hope you get this card again.
To a child all history is ancient, antecedent,
And then gets filled in if given time.
This game, for instance, had its origin
In a series of children’s books written during
The First World War. One of the ones
They read back then before packing you
Off to bed, as though in childhood’s bungalow—
the mouse boy takes Uncle Wiggily ahead—
And then into that waiting world
In which the dead are orphaned.

 

Robert Gibb is the author of fourteen books including, most recently, Pittsburghese (Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, 2023). Other books include Sightlines (Prize Americana in Poetry, 2019), Among Ruins (Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, 2017), After (Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, 2016), The Burning World (Miller Williams Poetry Prize, 2004) and The Origins of Evening (National Poetry Series, 1997). He has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an appearance in Best American Poetry and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award (2012) and Strousse Award (2011).

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