Without the Twin

 

 

I’m camped out around the Paleo fire.

All my irons in it, when one half-second

after I want to ask her if she’s seen the gold-

finch yet this spring, it darts out of the sumac.

 

It’s a Jungian shudder flows through my bones,

as soon after I think of Charles Olson, that Titan,

who downright stole fire from the gods, & paid an

awful price with voracious eagle gnawing at his side.

 

Damn, jazz & poetry, painting, I told her

I thought immediately of Francis Bacon, let

alone Bob Rauschenberg, damned, to have such

insights require light from the fire of the gods, but

 

who’d trade it in for any normalcy I see all around,

some poor excuse for life barely lived, some life

without the twin, as Olson wrote, of life itself:

Art.

Robert Gibbons

 

 

Robert Gibbons, a former Gloucester resident, is the author of nine books of poetry. In 2013, in addition to completing a Trilogy of prose poems with Nine Point Publishing,  he published Olson/Still: Crossroad, a brief study concerning the similarities in approach to art by Olson in words, and Clyfford Still in paint.