Small Elegy

By Reginald Gibbons b. 1947 Reginald Gibbons

Someone has left us now

before we have even touched hands.

Getting lost in the pity of it

sweeps you into an unknown stretch

of canyon where oars thud

against rock and rip free, you clutch

at help, and even though

you save yourself, the river

funnels through the gorge

and roars, roars, roars.

Regret, a backwash of pain,

one lost life swirls down rapids,

rushes away, out of reach.

It’s not forgetting that you want —

it would be easy to drop

one shoulder and dive, to come up

gasping in a car on the way to work

or blue in the face over the dishpan

staring for who knows how long

at a cup scoured clean under the suds.

And not remembering.

But the absence that is born

must live as long as a man or a woman.

There: it comes invisible headfirst,

a bloodstreaked nothing, and is flushed away.

While in the white room the dry light

is cold; and waiting to be taken home

mute ghosts lie in a row of empty cribs.

Source: The Ruined Motel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981)

Biography

Born and raised in Houston, Reginald Gibbons earned his BA in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, and both his MA in English and creative writing and his PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Gibbons is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (1997), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, and Creatures of a Day (2008), finalist for the . . .

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