america adrift

The Oblique Angle
by Robert Gibbons

Down to two broken knees I ignore, & walk the walk on East End Beach,

then climb the ladder yet again to chop ice out of the gutter, when up there,

stationary, at the oblique angle I like to see the world, I spot the half moon,

then carry on a conversation with the crows who think, yes, they think,

(remember the guy who fed crows on Brace Cove told of one placing a dime

from its beak at his feet in gratitude?) I might dig something up up there like

the animal carcass I dealt with last fall getting leaves out instead of ice, but

there I stood immobile on the turning earth awaiting return of spring sun

exactly two weeks away. Memory went trudging off to Napa one summer,

San Franciscan streets & Napa vines; wine at the Elyse Quonset hut they

used as tasting room for favorite Zinfandel; or the Mondavi mansion, where

they treated us well as writers, (even though the head of the clan didn’t know

I hadn’t forgotten his attempt to seduce my wife back to California at the

shindig down there in DC, when Julia Child consented to have her picture

taken with Kathleen, although I let it go at the Time, & then ten years later,

too, when witnessing the old man embroiled in family squabbles over who

owned what in Napa.) San Francisco didn’t let me down either as I tracked

Kerouac around with map & secret notebook he advised keeping in “Belief

& Technique for Modern Prose,” pasted in along with pictures of Kathleen in

Paris staring out through the bottom of a wine glass just as I did on my walk

today finding the Montiron through the monocular docked across the bay

crazily reminiscing to the day I caught Senator Packwood out of the corner of

my eye (who’d kissed one too many women outright & on the sly) standing

outside the Capitol Hill restaurant bar & grill, The Monocle, trying to garner

sympathy from New York Senator Patrick Moynahan sashswaying toward

the double-parked limo in no condition to remember anything after lunch that

day, & surely couldn’t gather votes enough to save Packwood’s ass. On the

ladder chopping ice for the third day running, wondering why I’ve been so

fortunate to have wrong things go right at the right Time, right things go right

right away in a spontaneous life even mother commented on once that I was

someone who could step in something awful & come out smelling like solera

Cabernet they called Abacus decanted in the boardroom of ZD wines that

week by both sons of the owner, owners themselves, I guess, as things go in

this country, my own old man passing on so little inheritance, but discipline,

heart, will, & precision, when he spoke, no bull allowed, bro, no easy way,

his way or the harder highway, which I often embarked upon in Napa, San

Francisco, Bremen, Paris, Nice, the meat factory, fish, leather dyeing wheels

at eighteen or battering ice out of the gutter with two bandaged knees

because you can’t trust off-season roofers to do it right. Vines of Napa

crawling up rungs of the ladder along with the lovely song Kerouac keened:

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind, also rising like heat off

asphalt I recall walking around North Beach, or Nob Hill, where the old man

recommended seeing things from the Top of the Mark, where he, too, took in

the view, on leave in the service in the Forties, the three of us knowing just

how much service it takes to take in the view of life at the oblique angle,

where Beauty lasts.

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Robert Gibbons is the Poetry & Fiction Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Janus Head.
A review of his new collection, Beyond Time (available here) is located at the current issue of Evergreen Review, including his poem, American Pastoral.
Robert (b)logs at his own website, robertgibbons.net.

In the unabridged version of his review for us here, our own Bent Sørensen wrote, “Robert Gibbons is one of the finest practitioners of prose poetry in the US today. His words flow with speed and grace across white pages or screen spaces, framing the emptiness of their own margins, being larger inside than their boundaries would suggest possible, folding back on themselves and spilling off the margins of the pages.”

It was Bent’s piece which first introduced me to Gibbons’ work and I was instantly attracted to the aesthetics of poetical “screen spaces,” especially in new media. What Bent calls the “tactile quality of language” is particularly evident in Gibbons’ beautiful virtual sequence bearing the same title as his recent collection, Beyond Time. Bent’s review is a must for the uninitiated, providing a wealth of insights and links, including Camelia Elias‘ review of his previous book, Body of Time.

Appropriate to the particular temporal and spatial parameters of the medium and the temporality and spatiality of Gibbons’ prose, his review concludes with a note on Gibbons’ own (b)log, or “blog of poetry”:

Robert has quite recently taken the full step and gone on-line with his very own website, which contains links to many of the people and publications mentioned above. It also hosts the most generous offering of his poetry I can imagine, in the shape of what Robert calls his log, where – on an almost daily basis – one can read a new prose poem by Robert, literally logging the movements in space and time of his body and mind. This generous outpouring of fresh work is in some ways becoming a Pepys-like diary in poems, but in keeping with the vocabulary of the medium it presents itself in, we should of course simply call it a blog of poetry. On one hand, I personally miss getting these poems one by one in my mailbox, but the archive now being created will in time come to stand as the most comprehensive one-man library of prose poetry available on-line. Robert Gibbons, thus, remains one of the finest practitioners of prose poetry, not just of today, but beyond time.