Last Lake
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A slow parade of old west enthusiasts,
camp song and hymn, came in along the winding
way where rural declined to suburban, slow
riders and wagoners passing a cow staked
to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly
up—not in vacant lots the ancient icons
of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,
in sacrifices and customs of bride-price
or dowry. (It’s good people no longer make
blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,
for example, and in the crunching gravel
parking lots of small churches—oh but we do.)
“The evening forgives the alleyway,” Reginald Gibbons writes in his tenth book of poems—but such startling simplicities are overwhelmed in us by the everyday and the epochal. Across the great range of Gibbons’s emblematic, vividly presented scenes, his language looks hard at and into experience and feeling. Words themselves have ideas, and have eyes—inwardly looking down through their own meanings, as the poet considers a lake in the Canadian north, a Chicago neighborhood, a horse caravan in Texas, a church choir, a bookshelf, or an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. The last lake is the place of both awe and elegy.
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Last Lake - Reginald Gibbons
Last Lake
Last Lake
Reginald Gibbons
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
REGINALD GIBBONS is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Gibbons is a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and translator, and his many books include translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and modern Spanish and Mexican poets; the novel Sweetbitter and a forthcoming collection of short stories; the critical study How Poems Think; and nine books of poems, among them the National Book Award finalist Creatures of a Day and Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41745-5 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41759-2 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226417592.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gibbons, Reginald, author.
Title: Last lake / Reginald Gibbons.
Other titles: Phoenix poets.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Series: Phoenix poets
Identifiers: LCCN 2016018416 | ISBN 9780226417455 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226417592 (e-book)
Classification: LCC PS3557.I1392 L37 2016 | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For my beloved C.
Contents
Acknowledgments
ONE
A Neighborhood in Chicago
Memorial Day
Belief
Last Lake
Canasta
On Self and Soul
1. The night’s a metonym
2. A ploughman leans his everything
3. (Bright Candlelight)
4. The question isn’t whether we should be
5. The plenitude of what is is the diet of the mind
6. Soul,
the word, is ancient (from Old English)
7. Livingness itself, neither bad nor benign
Ritual
A Bookshelf
Divergence
A Veteran
TWO
Dark Honey
1. In the rainy sub-
2. I remember that
3. Gods never were. And
4. In seaside autumn
5. (The Big River)
6. The skull has evolved
7. (I sense by its im-
8. The cranium dome
9. Poor old page-earth—sized
10. Mandelshtam’s Greek bees
11. Even on remote
12. This craft of the ear’s
13. Rivers of gasping
14. (But . . .)
15.