Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Dear Reader
Though we've done this many times before it doesn't make it any less miraculous that a fugitive intimacy can sequester itself in the nearly invisible here dissolving an entire alphabet into thoughts strung from more distant thoughts like stars inside a strange machine that counts on you to propel it
with a joule of your mind's breath pushing young ships into the harbor where they ferry the very idea that music needs no mediation tacking this way and then that as if each to earn the name we moments ago christened them with INTUITION LAYAWAY LAST HOPE new fleets drifting off as older ones threaten return across soft borders some smuggling some gone long enough to reappear as unrecognizable as paint swatches read differently in the sun another among the infinite things that blue-green never names but still colors wildly in the spell that watches over you as you lie awake a little longer wondering what happens to the hours
Prayer for November
Brazen angels, stubborn saboteurs send us a sign.
Silent priests of the coat check,
cherubs of every appetite, all the powers of ten,
if we can believe in you, we can believe again.
Assure us we'll be spared. Tell us it's been you ghostwriting our astonishing memoirs all along.
Loyal docents, restless spirits of lost chess-masters,
dogs with one eye, lead us home.
Spray-paint the orange X on our doors and place the warm coin into our hands.
Promise it won't end in any of the ways we think it will. Pile snow onto the capitol and fossilize the partisans. Stuff sawdust into the senators' crooked mouths and announce the lies have all been told.
Spoon the cure onto every cracked tongue —
then kiss the food right down our throats.
Afternoon breeze of one syllable,
arsonists with no matches, stab wounds healing into smiles, taxis at midnight, shine on.
Shine your penlights into the backs of our eyes and swear you see no blindness.
Whisper the forgotten melody into our ears.
Show the skywriters how to spell without looking back, we've been fools,
we've wasted more than we've saved,
we can be loved after all.
Elegy for Abe Vigoda
The most horrible person has been elected president.
The hardest thing to fathom is the present. Familiar sounds arrive at my door from the school down the street.
The kid with the freshest haircut holds a rubber football while hosting a Chautauqua on defensive pass interference.
Seven students stand at the back of the orchestra, stoned with percussion.
For the thirty-third time in her life a science teacher announces the oldest layer of rock is called Precambrian.
They've trained us to believe anything.
So is the rumor true? Yes, Abe Vigoda has died.
That name, like something resurrected from a dictionary. Abe: another word for honesty. And vigoda, meaning:
a sacred temple for vampires.
About the past I never feel the same way twice.
When I was sick and my father somewhere across the planet, a Trinitron television wheeled into my bedroom dispensed the medicine of Abe Vigoda by slow drip.
I could hear the ice thunder as it calved in the pond across the street.
Like a superhero with the powers of an exhausted mime, Abe Vigoda cured my fear of ghosts while teaching me how to wear the suit of adulthood the right amount reluctantly,
and holster my revolver behind my back where I can never reach it.
My father is again far from me,
visiting the clinic where they treat idiopathic positional vertigo by reorienting the crystals of the inner ear,
which once helped him toss exceptional spirals timed perfectly so that as I caught or not the football I crashed into arbor vitae that was the closest thing I had to a brother pummeling wisdom into me.
The past is surprisingly punctual.
All of time is with us here,
each next moment waiting right where we left it when we last felt safe inside our heads wondering what kind of leathery faces they might grow into as we held the flashlight beneath our chins to say the one funny thing we needed to while leaning into the dark.
Idaho
The best thing about riding a horse is the better shadow you make. The best part of the better shadow is knowing only half of what it's thinking. Even doing nothing is a form of moving on. Through the white pines the horses walk single file, in a sentence, each rider another noun aspiring to the verb to be.
The forest has no replica. Its beasts disprove everything.
At dusk, your worries are a sack of rabbits you have to carry down to the river and press slowly beneath the surface until you feel it go still. In the morning,
when you wake, you'll think you stitched the valley back together by opening your eyes.
L'Avenir Est Quelque Chose
All day for too long everything I've thought to say has been about umbrellas.
It's hard to remember how I came to possess whichever one I find in my hand, or hanging there now upside-down in the closet like sleeping bats,
each one too tiny or huge,
like our own ideas, always needing to be shaken off and folded up before we can properly forget them on the train.
Most of my predictions are honestly just hopes: a sudden sundress in March,
regime change in the North,
or the one where Amanda wins the big book award from the baby boomers.
There's that green-and-white umbrella the cereal-company interns handed us outside the doomed ball game,
the one for sun,
the one with a wooden handle as crooked as the future we reach for whenever one of us needs a stand-in for a dance partner.
You once opened it in the living room so Scarlett could have a picnic beneath what felt to her like a tent,
as it felt to me like my prediction we would live forever was already true.
When trying to understand I tend to look up and occasionally spot nothing more than a thousand pinholes in black nylon,
it's enough to get you to Greece and back,
or something to kiss beneath,
who knows how this is going to play out?
I know you won't ever be able to say exactly what you're feeling either.
The way thoughts pop open overhead as we pull closer to what's between us,
the rain playing the drum that's suddenly us.
Drone
Isn't this the life Weren't the white feathers
feathering the young
Shouldn't the invention solve the disease Didn't the guilt end with the getaway Aren't you the clever one
For the splash of silver sense For the fountainry of phonemes For a grownup desk job
And without winter Without any equinox or ration
In the cast that hasn't dried In the sutures of our own skin Weren't the Lilliputians sweet
Everybody crossing their eyes sees the figure eight Everyone's a satellite Everyone becomes that star Everybody dance everybody get out
Will the mouse outrun the hawk Will the impulse to resist bring a will to surrender Will the owner of a green Subaru Outback
please report to the Fan Information Booth
on Concourse C
Did we ever doubt our devices Did we punch the right holes in the earth Did the queen smash her bottle across
the hull did the little ones toe the line
Was 16 the correct number Was the whispering coming from inside the hut Was the instant they stopped running
the moment the verdict was returned Was the balcony high enough for a view
Aren't you glad you're more headlight than deer Aren't the birds quiet before they strike
Isn't the view marvelous Isn't the hum like hearing a needle sew Isn't the technology immaculate Shouldn't this much be obvious Shouldn't we praise the distance Shouldn't the crater be great enough
to bury the dead
Didn't we greet each other with our eyes Don't our values begin with logic Doesn't a clock cookie time
Up from the higher laws Up until the chorus Up in the sky it's a bird it's an eagle
Aren't we safer behind our keyboards Aren't you sweet Isn't this grand isn't this just like them
Don't you wish you knew what they were thinking Don't you dare draw the gods
Wouldn't we be fools to fail to admire the screen Wouldn't the fighting be bloodier without us Were your coordinates correct
As long as your life lives As long as you're asking As if lightning struck down As if distance could be clean
For now the fog lowers into the bay For now the young engineers get tattoos For now let them think it's brave
Now take one small step to your right Now and that's an order Now the winds hush and you gust upon this earth
Fire Drill
I hope you have a month to read the first fifteen chapters of your own autobiography they're about an atom.
Some say the sun meant more then.
Today a few more trees are scheduled to release their fall collections.
I don't have a swatch for their nesting instinct.
I don't have the right crayon for insomnia.
When I say you are this morning's incumbent I mean accomplice.
When I swipe down with my thumb to refresh the present the Next Now arrives in the nick of time.
Next Now, heal us with opportunity.
Next Later, assure us our preferences have been saved.
What if I really am a suspension bridge and by standing here I make my most profound gesture toward the world?
What if the sun were on a game show —
could anyone stop it?
I shouldn't talk this way.
Twinkle twinkle everyone outside.
You wanted a revolution,
you're getting an operating system update.
The past tense of to be is was.
You can check was off your bucket list.
To Be Transmitted by Fax
Like a movie that begins in an isolated polar research facility,
R.J. MacReady asking the crew tough questions about the odd Malamute that's wandered in off the tundra — when suddenly the generator blows —
I like it when the lights go out.
I like shopping for groceries with a storm on the way making choices I'll question for days,
everyone's in a rush and the coffee's about to run out.
I like imagining you grocery shopping in the rain in a mid-sized coastal town where I don't know the names of the regional chains or the shortcut through the park where the kids play a game for hours before realizing no one's keeping score.
In the corner drugstore there's a yellowing machine that appears to have heard it all before, no urgent news coming in over the transom.
But from the other side of the hills there's the sound of chopper blades and a flickering searchlight.
When you press the machine's green button you can hear the song of a line left open.
Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber
Little glass planet,
I like picking you up.
As if I'm holding my own thought,
one blown molten with a puff of some craftsman's breath — is it still inside you?
You are a beautiful bauble it's hard to imagine anyone hurling you into the sea,
but eventually we all have a job to do.
I think of the early mornings and storm warnings you braved to find the village dinner.
I don't remember carrying you home on the plane from Seoul,
crew dozing behind the cockpit door,
autopilot engaged — what were they dreaming of?
I don't even know what shore you washed up on: Busan, Incheon, Samcheok.
Are you glad we made you a home here so far from the sea? is a question I won't ask in case your answer is the one you don't want to give.
I love how perfectly you fit in my hand,
at first cold, and the way the morning looks through you, as green and cloudy as an unknown we no longer fear.
But I wouldn't want to be held up to the sun either, not because I'm a monster,
but because I, too, am translucent and trusting,
and mistake both for the truth.
Beneath our lives there are sordid undulations and embraces brief and sweet,
a nearly invisible line connecting us to the fleet,
with every breath worth saving,
like the sip of air inside us full of an old sea's grace or the ancient word hidden in our lungs that once released back into the wild will finally set us free.
What the Cold Wants
Complete mind control,
though it might begin Off-Broadway,
in a simple ceviche, or a mostly believable alibi.
Generally speaking, what the cold wants is ridiculous. The problem with the cold is that it comes from more of it.
It's divisible only by one and itself.
The cold is not invited to many weddings.
Among the cold's lifetime achievements: every touch of a stethoscope, zero for twelve from the beyond the arc, Shackleton's last note.
According to experts, the average temperature of the known universe is negative 454.76 degrees Fahrenheit.
Room temperature is a miracle.
That's what the cold wants you to believe,
that it's perfectly normal and should be allowed to feel right at home as it slithers under a door to begin making a meal of your toes.
Like a hungry predator, the cold knows to save the warm, wet heart for last.
The cold is a form of surveillance.
Its primary ingredient is time.
Safe at headquarters, the scientist listens to the batteries in the radio collar slowly die, but she knows the wolf is out there still.
From you, the cold wants nothing but in.
Substitution
If only life weren't so confusing.
If I can't leave town with you,
here's an old record instead.
I can't miss anyone who doesn't adore Slim Gaillard.
At first I was sure I was going to grow up to be a pilot.
Today I don't know who most of you people are —
and I thought I was God's chosen creature!
Like the piglet raised by a farm cat whose mission in life has become sunning on the porch and acting aloof,
maybe inside every hog is a kitten.
As inside every wide receiver is a ballerina,
and inside every ballerina a swan who is really a banished tzarina tending to her colony of bees.
Any sauce comes with a swap out,
each lunch sack its secrets,
overdressed greens instead of fries,
another poem made out of ideas, not things.
A whistle blows and Coach nods at the skinny kid on the end of the bench.
The figure skater does a double instead of a triple and loses a tenth.
The hydrogen nuclei fuse and now it's helium,
and when it fills the balloons at the brat's birthday his aunt's house doesn't seem so horrible anymore.
My heart is a jackrabbit.
There is no trick: the way to eat fire is you just eat fire.
I Can Do It All in My Lifetime
If I were to say the subjunctive is indistinguishable from the machinations of morning itself,
would that put me even more under its spell?
In the repair-shop garage, the most broken-down cars sleep on the top bunk, while on the edge of town,
pylons trim the highway to one lane, stopping traffic for miles, all for a steamroller abandoned in the rain.
It's as close to forever as it's possible to know.
Have you ever felt so alone that it was oddly also impossible to be only yourself? Then you know what it's like to not have a name, only a sense of lightness and a suspicion that everything is uncalled for,
and for reasons no one can understand we still believe that for our children it will not be too late.
Ode to the Future
Of my people, it's true, I imagine you among them, which is as close as I get to believing in heaven, so I'm not so alone.
Fuck this government. Fuck honey mustard.
Fuck the new advanced whitening formula.
If this is what I know, does it make me anything more than another dumb pilgrim who hasn't lived through a single potato blight?
Lucky me, I rarely dream about the past,
nor have I reached the shore of Great Conclusions, how long will that last? I'm no more done with joy than I am gravity, there are things I'll never let them take, there's a photo of my daughter locked inside a safe behind a velvet painting in the smoky backroom office of my skull.
It makes my head swell, as if everything is steamy,
or we're on a schooner without any knowledge of knots.
There are no do-overs, every moment arrives with the sheen of the new,
so let's make America a set of problems we can admit exists again, and still have the will to solve, we can get better at being alive,
you can learn a lot from being around horses,
you have to let the fury melt away and stand in the sun.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Little Glass Planet"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Dobby Gibson.
Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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