At Noon

At Noon

By Reginald Gibbons b. 1947 Reginald Gibbons
The thick-walled room’s cave-darkness,
cool in summer, soothes
by saying, This is the truth, not the taut   
cicada-strummed daylight.
Rest here, out of the flame—the thick air’s
stirred by the fan’s four
slow-moving spoons; under the house the stone
has its feet in deep water.
Outside, even the sun god, dressed in this life
as a lizard, abruptly rises
on stiff legs and descends blasé toward the shadows.

Reginald Gibbons, “At Noon” from The Ruined Motel. Copyright © 1981 by Reginald Gibbons. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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

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Poet Reginald Gibbons b. 1947

POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern

Subjects Nature, Summer

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Reginald Gibbons

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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Poems by Reginald Gibbons

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SUBJECT Nature, Summer

POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Originally appeared in Poetry magazine.

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