The Poetry of Mark Gibbons

I’ve been badgered into it,
the hole, the pit, a basement
cleaning project seventeen
years in the making.

I begin vacuuming cobwebs
overhead insulating the floor
joists. Unfinished basements
are nests, attics underground.

Plastic garbage bags and cans
brim with the toxic residue of
human hoarding, bottles of unknown
liquids, rusts and molds, corroded

crap unreadable as unlabeled
mason jars from a cellar. Yellowed
bedding and sour pillows bagged
for abandoned animals on death row.

Boxes of vases, knickknacks, pots
and pans, Tupperware, a water
filter and serenity fountain, used
books and old magazines collected

for the yard sale—my wife’s scheme.
Camping gear over forty years old,
my repair kit in a Prince Albert can,
Zig Zag wheat straws and a Bic

lighter, the old clay pipe stashed
on a top shelf by the triple beam
balance scale used for years to
measure and sell lids of weed.

It was given to me by an Abbie
Hoffman lover who stole it
from the School of Mines—now
he worships Bill O’Reilly’s mouth.

Boomboxes and blenders, door
latches, mirrors, boots and shoes,
curtains, throw pillows, and lots
of clothes, lots and lots of tight

womens’ clothes. There is no end
to this deep-mess chore . . . yet
the arrival of my son in two weeks
just two days after this scheduled

garage sale sends me back down
there with more rags and bags . . .
a determined mind keeps prodding
me from behind, wonders casually

aloud from the ether upstairs,
How’s it going down there? And
the badger snorts a gritted-teeth
grin, hisses, “What the fuck

would you know about it?” I yell,
“WHAT?!” . . . How’s it going?
“It’s going out the fucking door!”
That’s good! she sings. “YEAH!”

I chide scrubbing a pile of dried
puke from the cement floor
before cleaning the cat boxes
and hauling more shit up and out

to the mound in the alley. I open
a beer, guzzle half, go back to
sweeping, dusting, mopping
and moping. Of course, in the end,

I have to admit that I do like
the look of it—open, clean, bare
like white space on the page—
I smile. This is my poem today.

His shaved bullet head bobs
up and down as he bends
to rinse glasses. The tee shirt
tight on his bulging wide
shoulders, a bar rag slung over
one collar bone, the Screamin’
Orphans serenading from speakers
overhead. He recites Basho
and Bukowski while pulling taps.

The patrons come for the pints,
pool, poetry, and blarney, the same
palaver and pleasures found
in Derry and Clifton pubs, along
with Whiskey Box poems
spirited from the gyre turning
and churning in his Irish blood.

This bartender-poet unfolds
his lingo in case after case
of whiskey, this place, faces
that come to him in dreams.
He sings the joys of distillations
and hails warriors who fight to
end all subjugation—a voice-
force for the word and the sod.

His Whiskey Box Sonnets
are perfect appetizers
to tantalize the palates of
insatiable human minds
unfolding one flap, one glass
at a time while spinning
the bottles and racing the clock,
squeezing out every last drop.

This bar, the weeks, yet
another year, are the stages,
the struggles, the loves
and fears, that this poet works
day in and out like Jesus
busting tires at Miko’s Garage,
with no net, no insurance,
no long-range plan, short of
feeding his sons his whiskey
visions of today—opening
boxes and diving in.

–for James Jay

Walking across the campus
of the University of Montana
with a group of summer camp writers,
ten year-olds, we stop to view
the sculpture I’ve passed maybe
a hundred times before, an iron cone
topped with a wild, wavy shock

of aluminum hair: one child’s octopus,
another’s volcano. An astute student
reads out, “Tepee Burner!” A boy’s
expression gives me pause before
I begin explaining: when I was their age,
sawmills burned slash and sawdust
around the clock in these tepee shaped

structures. What would have been air
pollution alerts, we called “the mill,”
“wood smoke,” or “the sweet smell
of money.” That yellow ground fog
was our eerie London imagining Jack
the Ripper waiting like a werewolf
to attack, slit, and gut another co-ed.

Growing up sheltered by the lumbering
denials of a Christian culture determined
to hide embarrassing issues like genocide
behind Thanksgiving dinner and a heroic
last stand on the Little Big Horn, we wanted
to believe we were the good guys
wearing the white hats. No point in dwelling

on mistakes in the past. We believed
in putting our problems behind us, or behind
bars. Bars helped us contain problems, preferably
reservation bars. Tepee burners were everywhere
when I was a kid, but then so were “niggers
in the woodpile” and on the prairie. We caught
them by a toe, “eeny-meany-miney-moe.”

Didn’t study the history of the Indian
Wars in school, avoided the Holocaust,
too, like there was some statute of
cancellation for mass murder. Maybe after
Japan and Germany, we didn’t want to
talk about killing out of fear. Instead we’d
focus on Hitler, our model of what to abhor,
and never “get to” a discussion of ethics
beyond basketball. The track record
was clear: in 1540 the Spanish burned
thousands of Indians alive at Mabila,
set the standard for the next hundred years.
1637, the English massacred six hundred
at Mystic, and the French slaughtered another

five in 1730. I mention a handful from
the list that boggles the mind, thousands to
millions of brown corpses strewn over centuries.
California vigilantes, settlers, posses of white
men systematically went about annihilating
the coastal Indians. Here in Montana, on the Marias
River, Piegan women, children, and the elderly

were massacred just eighty years before
the existence of me. You’ve heard of
Wounded Knee where two hundred-some
Sioux were attacked at their winter camp, 1890,
by the 7th Cavalry, experienced tepee burners.
Custer, Sherman, Sheridan, Chivington,
proud Americans, soldiers, leaders of men

were known to say: “Nits make lice!”
and “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
They were even fonder of the stench
of blood and burning flesh. Extermination
was the necessary task they were commissioned
to do. They rode their high horses and polished
their brass. It’s hard for me to admit this

ignorance, my blindness: the “poet”
oblivious to metaphor, his own prejudice,
two words he’d never questioned, never owned,
let alone stood in blackened moccasins among
smoking tepees, the cavalry bugling, watched
the charge in his mind, the horses hooves, heard
the screams of frantic old ones and kids, mothers

armed only with infants, and smelled gunpowder,
blood on steel. Lice . . . the solution . . . horror.
War makes men insane. How do we manage
to forget? What we say and how we say it
precedes what we do. We must try to understand,
be more aware of our words. Think like a poet:
are tepee burners gone? Where are the nits of fear?

Ed Lahey was the king of Montana poetry
for me, and I really wanted to meet him. So,
reluctantly, I made the effort to go introduce

myself, intrude upon his privacy. He lived
desperately alone. Ed invited me in under the guise
of literary kinship, but it was obvious to me

he was glad to have some company. I found him
to be open and as vain as me, blessed or cursed
with the gift of the gab, and I was fascinated by

his stories—the booze and Irish heritage, those
tales of revolution, drugs, mental hospitals, and loss—
breakdowns I felt connected to. The images

in his verses, the voices, his hard words—some sort
of working class elegance was starkly laid bare,
and his deeply resonant baritone invoked the stony

mythology of Butte, its immigrant stiffs and worn-
down women, their dirty urchins running wild
in gangs while the clank and rattle of the industrial

age siphoned all from the inside out. The survivors,
those tough huddled masses yearning to dance
and sing after each shift after shift after shift of drill,

blast, muck, and drink, religiously believed Lady
Liberty—the inalienable right to breathe free. Ed
Lahey embodied that for me, and I recognized

my father inside him, shouldn’t have been
surprised they were born on the same day
in Butte, twenty years apart, two Cancers

I’ll take to the grave. Ed and I began visiting
regularly at his apartment usually over beer
or coffee. I know he looked forward to those

dates, the companionship, something to do
outside his head. He told me so. Ed was honest
with me, but some days his mind wouldn’t play

with his heart. We tried to do what friends do,
stay true to it, the relationship, that Tuesdays
with Morrie story, and we did, up until the end.

Those last few years in the nursing home were
no fun for anyone as many of you know from
your own time spent signing in on death row.

Still, showing up is an honorably conflicted love
that rarely gets romanticized. We know the poems,
like us, will eventually disappear, dissolve to dust.

The value we place on fame or acclaim, our desire
to be read and respected for our tales of sense and
sensibility, won’t survive (most likely much longer

than us) embossed with our names on some post-
digital shelf. This life, this waking awareness
we are, knows only itself, so we get to decide what

matters to us. Today I think not of words, poems or
books, those paper trails we leave behind. What’s been
the best for me are the ephemeral moments, the memories,

those conversations and connections, our devotions to
each other, to being here, together, whenever we can—
hoping the sunset fades slowly into the long dark night.

My son did one
of those Pollack dribble paintings
on cardboard, a masterpiece
of texture, color, and warp.
I stuck it on the basement wall.

What is art?

Throw shit and see what sticks . . .
throw hard enough and it will
stick for awhile.
We never know for sure
about the sticking.
All we can do is keep tossing shit.

Art is what

It is if something sticks for you,
if only for an instant.
Maybe that’s all art is.
Or maybe art is just the act
of throwing. Do you wonder

Is what art?

Light on landscape is art
if someone sees it that way.
Sound is music
to those who hear it,
the heater fan’s whir
backed up by Dylan
and the engine’s purr,
maybe your voice joining
the choir in your head
stomping boots or shoes,
whomping leather gloves
in time and solidarity
to the Workingman’s Blues,
your breath billowing
in the cab, fingers and legs
cold-stiff, yet the sun burns
warm on your face as
you begin another mundane
Monday depressing
the clutch, engaging reverse,
rolling back to roll ahead,
shift to first, accelerate
into the street, the flow
of the week, squinting
and savoring the heat
on your skin, you smile
at this gift for taking it all
in, this living to sing
softly till the long night
begins, a melancholy tribute
to working class women
and men who created a life,
this art of living the blues.

—after Dylan again

Mongo waltzes whiskey barrels up a plank-
ramp into the old, barn-red Dodge coupe’s trunk.

His crouch-n’-dig stance like a lineman
pushing a blocking sled or a lumper lift-

grunting a gun safe up a staircase one
riser-bump thrust at a time—rhythm, pace,

balance, and gut—impresses the Miner Poet
driving this thin air dream, humming Irish

ditties and blues refrains. Blood ringing
in their ears, they pass the flask, chew couplets

and spondees, compare arched-brow stares,
recall cold nights and dark days weathering

bipolar storms. They toast and crave a low
pressure front, an imposed isolation,

winter’s whisper in the soul, that cozy slow-
down cabin fever zone all artists need

to splay their own particular noise, unload
the distillation and fermentation

of what is inside-out—those fears and joys
uncorked—the sweet-burning breath of God.

—for James Jay

—for gary lundy

aware cocky youth
knows no hand rails
umbrellas no spare
anythings it collects

itself throws down
shots and dreams
gobbles rain or sun-
shine so it grows

wants and deals
out the naked hour
youth dances to be
grass your coming

intensity scream-sings
out feels it all today
listen hear the knock
of age care less fear

full soft sighs cry
scan the night sky
search the blue soul
what lies up below

Mist, the marine layer rolls
along the ridge behind Ventura,
the slope green from fires
last fall. A bi-plane circles
overhead, momentarily drowning
out the construction clatter and whine
of table saws and saws-alls, air
compressors, a chainsaw, generators,
planers, sanders, and hammer taps
competing music for the chickadees
and finches, the back-up beepers,
the mourning dove’s coo, crow caws,
too, diesel engines, tires rolling
across asphalt. Nothing wrong here,
a perfect symphony, this song
where lemons grow beside tangerines
and avocados. Still Ciara only
cares about me. She waits
for me to throw the ball, the stick,
the rock, anything at all and keep on
doing it until one of us dies.
Her black eyes stare at me, two
opaque windows masking the fields
she runs frantically, wildly
burying her bones, tending the herds
she works in her dreams, doing for men
whatever they need, that service
she trades for love, this black bitch,
Irish queen of a small green plot,
her lot, this California back yard.

Ed Lahey speaks, crawls out
today from my berserkly pit of
copper verse despair, spits-up the green
blood of my cabbage patch mind.

He strides down Galena,
eyes squinting through dirt,
smells a gaggle of gold geese,
horny as Old Sally’s goat.

There’s a knot of air stuck
deep in the stope of his throat.
He’s heard rumors underground
of money words he’d chewed

and penned deep in the honeycombed
belly of Butte then abandoned for
ivory thumbprints—Missoula kisses
for the ink of miner ghosts.

Call it poetry, call it love, call it
coffee stained sheets—call it cat shit
clutter, our pagan mother. Listen,
now! Listen here! Lahey speaks.