Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published in 2012. The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, spent several weeks on the Poetry Foundation’s list of contemporary best-sellers, and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, The New Republic, and Tin House as well as on the PBS NewsHour’s Art Beat, and are forthcoming in jubilat, Slice, and The Literary Review.---------
In the Courtesy Shuttle
First Writers Almanac’s familiar
piano riff then Keilor’s smooth
bass enter the carpeted space
between a lawyer headed to work,
a retired gentleman going home
to fiddle with an engine, send
a letter, fry an egg, and me,
and Garrison is like a piano
player in a restaurant—the men
discuss directions while he rumbles
on pleasantly in the background
about Kerouac’s scroll, Kay Ryan
and trees, and this is it, I think,
the cherry, the apotheosis for poetry:
a poem read beautifully
at drive time so regular folks
like us can talk over it. Maybe
the words we can’t hear between needle
and water slip in, implant deep
in the cortex, the folds we don’t use
because, really, who are we kidding,
a poem is best scribbled in the dark
then the paper ripped up and eaten
in small pieces, a secret the writer
will never forget the feeling of
and so whisper to his young son
in the middle of the night to quiet
him, words the boy will never remember
but that will shape who he will be.
Cracked
| I say poems are good and still chew this quiet until it tells me some fingers over walks buttons, eyebrows, giving drenched and tired of water what it wants for skin bellies—we are so often deep, our cell cities, our more, more, T-ball practice, yet there are still nights how well our bodies move transforms our fatigue tell and laugh and cry |
for nothing or just this one morning so rare, opening thing beyond rain thrilling and roofs and grass, tracing itself so freely, we’re all even when we know and need petals, taproots, seedpods, tired these days, marrow- papers stacked and asking playdates, ten books on dinosaurs late when we remember together and touch into a story we tell, out and sigh over. |
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photo credit for LeBlanc: Molly Haley