Prose Poems

 

 

by Robert Gibbons

 

 

 

 

 

Mandala of Mourning

 

 

Mandala of the ceiling fan whirling wordlessly above early summer humidity, drawing up the heavy silent weight of mourning in the empty room where we heard the unexpected news of the death of someone met only a few times, but someone close to someone close, whose Soul is equal to our own according to the Mandala of the ceiling fan whirling wordlessly above early summer humidity, drawing up the heavy silent weight of mourning in the empty room where we heard the unexpected news of the death of someone met only a few times, but someone close to someone close, whose Soul is equal to our own according to the Mandala of the ceiling fan whirling wordlessly above early summer humidity, drawing up the heavy silent weight of mourning in the empty room where we heard the unexpected news of the death of someone met only a few times, but someone close to someone close, whose Soul is equal to our own according to the sky where, when we step outside, the vastness of overwhelming silence can be overheard as transformative Memory of another solitary Soul becoming part of it, again. 

 

 

 

 

 

 Low & High Art

 

 

“It was the seat of a suspicious or cross-eyed goddess who was out to take us to her breast and to nurse us from her cold chambers until there was no trace left of us in the upper world.”

 

                                                                  —Walter Benjamin

 

 

I. 

 

Resorting, again, (it’s my economy,) to performing (at times the dance,) manual labor.  Without thought, but abundant in imagery.  During the exertion three photos of her, & one of the Paris cat appear before me. Three enigmatic looks.  To call them photographs is to cancel the low, little bit of Kitsch, (including rime,) I want here: color snapshots of her in Reims, Nice, & Brownfield, Maine; the black & white postcard of the cat sitting on the writing table we found on Boulevard St. Michel while doing laundry. 

 

 

II. 

 

In & out of mind as the limbs move, without thought, a proletarian gesture, to earn a living, at the same time to open up the visual surge.  Almost nostalgic physiognomies (ignominious?) of woman, of cat, unchanged, one framed, the others lined up between keyboard & screen, imposing recollections from when & where & how the real work gets done. 

 

 

III. 

 

Then there’s that one of her taken early one morning on the bed in the hotel looking through the bottom of a wine glass, hair disheveled, bedclothes in disarray, one eye closed, the other crossed (impossibly) away from the camera.  It’s used to mark a certain poem in my copy of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, A Thoroughbred.  “She is very ugly.  She is nevertheless delectable.”  The book now closed on the top shelf of the bedroom bookcase, taken down & opened every so often, shows the Kitsch snapshot exposing itself for what it isn’t. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

copyright © 2008 Robert Gibbons

 

Robert Gibbons's third full-length book of prose poems, Body of Time (Pittsburgh: Mise Publications), 2004, was reviewed by Camelia Elias in Cercles published in France.  Beyond Time: New & Selected Work, 1977-2007, is forthcoming from Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY, in 2008.  He is poetry & fiction editor of Janus Head.