#dobby gibson

[nomorechoirs]

“Upon Discovering My Entire Solution to the Attainment of Immortality Erased from the Blackboard Except the Word ‘Save’” by Dobby Gibson

[these-summer-nights-in-december]

[clayloam]

“hold everything”, dobby gibson

[malojasnake]

— After Reading Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life On My 49th Birthday, by Dobby Gibson

[missedstations]

“After Reading Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life On My 49th Birthday” - Dobby Gibson

On a dull December day it’s never noon   more briefly, though what a relief   to look around and realize our lies, in the long run, won’t last long.  

                       I feel like the nail   holding up someone else’s painting. My thoughts are the loose thing   in the dishwasher only I can hear. When I say, Snow, what will become of this world? it says, I was not taught future tense.

                       Through the window,   after the heavy storm, I can follow mysterious   paw prints to the spot along the fence   where, in summer, the neighbors like to whisper. They’ve taken their secrets inside. It’s left a silence so complete, so free   of ambition, it feels possible to know forgiveness,   which hammered thinner than memory carries a brighter light.

[slateblueearthbelow]

[missedstations]

"Polaroid" - Dobby Gibson

The problem with realism, you once told me, is the closer your art gets to it the more real it must become. Can memory be a worry? I suspect it works more like a wish. I worry I should have become a short-track speed skater. I wish I weren't this set of rusty steel claws. If I'm being honest I'm not entirely sure what a memory is. A drawer in the basement full of old batteries. A mirror you look into to see another mirror that shows you your own butt from behind. There isn't much I'd do over. not even the previous line. I'd rather watch everyone dance. If I'm left with one memory let it be dance. The crimson in a Joan Mitchell painting. That first F Nina Simone lingers on in "I Loves You, Porgy." The old lighthouse we walked out to near the harbor that summer. I remember you said it looked better from a distance where it was possible to imagine the light was still shining.

[manwalksintobar]

What Follows Us Now Must Soon Enough Be Carried // Dobby Gibson

To read the news of things both splendid and sad happening far from me today I had my computer keyboard whisper this coffee shop’s secret network password — pacific — and it clicked it was two years since I had seen the ocean and those I love who live near it. Like Dean, who could see the Bay from his bed but is now being kept alive in Texas by a box of valves and lithium batteries serving the functions of a human heart. The last time I saw him our bellies were filled with oysters and we were drunk in North Beach, which is where I can imagine Matthew now walks the hills with an endless twisting distorted Neil Young guitar solo traveling between his precision-engineered Chinese-manufactured ear buds. I don’t know whether Matthew listens to Neil Young, but I know what it sounds like when the fog pours around Coit Tower in the mid afternoon as you step inside a bar for a Sierra Nevada and a conversation about war or poetry. Matthew has written many beautiful and slightly tragic poems about my city, which he lived in just long enough to spend trapped in a cast. I never visited him once and in fact don’t know where he lived so I imagine it’s going to be difficult for you and probably him to believe that I miss him. But I was a little afraid of Matthew back then, and maybe still am, as I am often scared of people who are larger and more amazing than I, which feels like nearly everyone. I can’t drink beers at 3 p.m. very often or anytime soon live in San Francisco because I am trying to be a decent middle-class father, which requires living close to adequate schools and inexpensive consumer packaged goods. Many of my new best friends live as far from me as do my old best friends, like Amanda, who is rehabilitating an artificial steel hip she selected from a medical supply catalogue while sitting on her parents’ couch. Amanda says the hip feels like an ice cream headache in her leg. Dean says his box of heart valves feels like being followed by a cuckoo clock. That’s all I really know about how strange these things must feel though I was once chased by time. It was in Seoul, near Sinchon Station, where the sound of a second hand followed me and my wife as we walked with Mrs. Jeong, who had strapped a little girl who was not yet our daughter onto her back. She was carrying our future and my daughter’s future and my daughter’s past and now complete strangers feel the need to tell me that my daughter is “a lucky girl” forgetting or unaware that entire shelves of memoirs have been sarcastically titled Lucky Girl to awaken us to the horrible things we say to people who are just trying to be four years old. According to some of these books the presence of good fortune is something one has to decide for oneself, so today I thought about reaching for it without knowing what I was exactly supposed to grab, and I thought of that same afternoon in Seoul, which my wife and I spent as gentle imposters in Jogesi Temple. A woman prostrated herself next to us hundreds of times as a priest struck a gong and chanted things that felt as if they were about being human but also not and a small bird flew through the temple and kept landing on the Buddha’s giant golden shoulder. When I put my shoes back on I knew I would spend the rest of my life wondering many new things, including whether that bird was trapped in the temple or had been there all along by choice.