Are We There Yet?

By Dobby Gibson b. 1970 Dobby Gibson

You only have to make her one grilled cheese

in the suffocating heat of summer

while still wearing your wet swim trunks

to know what it’s like to be in love.

And you only have to sit once

for a haircut in the air conditioning

with the lovely stylist to forget all about it,

and to forget that anything in the universe

ever existed prior to the small, pink sweater

now brushing softly against your neck.

In this world, every birth is premature.

How else to explain all of this silence,

all of this screaming,

all of those Christmas card letters

about how well the kids are doing in school?

We’re all struggling to say the same old things

in new and different ways.

And so we must praise the new and different ways.

I don’t like Christmas.

I miss you that much.

For I, too, have heard the screaming,

and I, too, have tried to let it pass,

and still I’ve been up half the night

as if I were half this old,

and like you, I hate this kind of poetry

just as much as my life depends upon it.

They’re giving away tiny phones for free these days,

but they’ve only made

a decent conversation more precious.

One medicine stops the swelling,

another medicine stops the first medicine.

Just like you, I entered this world

made and kicking, and without you,

it’s precisely how I intend to go.

Dobby Gibson, “Are We There Yet?” from Skirmish. Copyright © 2009 by Dobby Gibson. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org

Source: Skirmish (Graywolf Press, 2009)

Biography

Born in Minneapolis, poet Dobby Gibson earned a BA at Connecticut College and an MFA at Indiana University. Originally in graduate school to study fiction, Gibson wrote his first poem at the age of 26. He described his defection from fiction in an interview with the online audio archive From the Fishouse: “I eventually spent all my time on my fiction working on beginnings and endings, and began to quit caring about plot and . . .

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