Oona’s Left 

Blow that trumpet honey. 
No shimmy, no shine, no 

abracadabra.  The marriage was
planned leather, blankets, 

maroon table, red rug, gold
sound of trombones, slide time 

to two-step his skinny smile, 
in the blue-lipped bedroom. 

She’d lingered nude,
windowward.  But the tailbone inside her 

hip could tilt.  If she minded her manners,
she could untangle.  Instead, she hunted 

the bone the fox left.  Went and left
with a cha-cha-cha, watching. 

Oona over the rocks.
A cleft between dimple and intent. 

(Harvard Review, No. 31)

Global Warming

Oona’s nails are pink as abalone. 
But she won’t shake hands.  Everyone’s holding 

cell phones, happy as clams,
in clenched grins.  I’m calling 

my twin ear, she says, they say,
to hear myself.  My onion, 

my own Vidalia, Slim Him says,
my yellow butternut, my sweet

potato, he laughs, specializing in vegetable
speech.  Oona’s smile curls 

like crazy.  It’s always fifty-three degrees
below, Slim speaks, geothermally.  They

are sinking in snow, knee-deep.  The hemlocks
wear hulky snow jackets.  Groovy

says Oona, out of date, she’s in duo-
folds.  It’s impossible, anymore,

to say what’s natural.  May as well
wear feathers and skin.  She’s been

plucked, pruned and brushed herself.
Oona’s got a mood on.

If anyone can be anyone, we must all
be one tree, she says.  Her outfit

quivers.  The white fox clenching
its own tail in its own jaw.

(FIELD Magazine, Number 70)

from Admit the Peacock

Silences

Step after step growing up
was the same as being alone.
There was no one on the street
but the gray house with that cross
of roses, where the father’d died.
At home, there was always
a vacuum cleaner somewhere.
And I was always
humid. My head full of damp
leaves, or the dowager magnolia. 

Then married (under Western skies
like the movies,) I walked all day
one day with him on Catalina Island,
silent,
though we passed a white stallion,
corralled,
and those bison, too weak
on feeble knees. We didn’t speak.
I sucked for juice a prickly pear.

Better to admit: the peacock
screeched all night.

Countdown

Let me go. Let me go!
He hits the lets with operatic force, willing
the people past the Red Sea. Me go. Me
go, amigo. Friend for life.
For life, for life, for life. No.
I don’t need the sons of a bitch.
Then he sees me. They can go.
They can go, dear. Just the two
of us. No shit and corruption.
Corruption, shun.
The deed is done. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7.
Goodbye. The shit they see is the same shit
they saw, no shit at all. 

Sitting close to the white edge, I watch
the night nurse’s sullen counting
of the hours, the number of pills. The one, two,
three, to get him out of bed, to wipe
his mouth. To wipe any of him.
The one, two – to move him
from the left side of the chair to the right.
The one to take food. The night nurse reads
a magazine about Jesus. Her big calm
body able to take his in her arms.

           (MARGIE, Volume Five)

from Inside the Exhibition

Pet Bird

In a world where there is no God,
the bird must do on a painted bar
in the kitchen, taking persimmons,
Cherrios, shredded turkey from my lips.
His azure shoulders, majesty.
He knows he belongs. I keep him
tethered by a silken strand, serving
sadness, pre-chewed.  I cannot fly.
I tend his pinion feathers,
between his scaly toes and clips.
If the sky has fallen, his crimson
streak I wear as blood
inside my heart, and mimic his
heart-stopping shriek at strangers.
My own neck tendons ache.

Sun Spots

The sun lamp on your bald head, the way
your lower jaw begins to resemble your mother’s
and her mother’s, as you gesture with the crooked
index finger, to jab insistence into humor, like her,
embarrassed eyes covered with white tissue, on the spot.
In pursuit of privacy, at first we hold in clenched fists,
particulars, then the quiet weeks of us alone.
I, on the nose of the Great Rock, patting moss,
you in the woods choosing straight sticks
to strip into clever door handles.  Without clothes,
all you want is to undress.  I, to tuck in.
A shot, two shots in the woods.  I’m on the top stair
overlooking you, staring at a blank wall
as if I were a color off the chart, out of date.
I skate into view waving light.  Can this be love?

                                            All poems © Rebecca Kaiser Gibson