More on: Margaret Gibson

How to do it, how hold
in balance

what misses the mark
and what hits it

What He Knew _____ for David :: Before Alzheimer’s and during it when he spoke in stray words or in sounds he sometimes moved his hands like birds _____ in flight… so that, watching his hands punctuate the air I’d ask myself Am I watching birds disappear? Or a flower, opening?   :: “If we…

Margaret Gibson is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Broken Cup, and a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter. Her second book, Long Walks in the Afternoon, was a Lamont Selection (now the James Laughlin Award) of the Academy of American Poets in 1982, and Memories of the Future in 1986 was co-winner of…

They’re on the move again, across the soundless moonlit snow, five deer single file along the narrow trail they deepen night after night with their heart-shaped hooves. Shivering, I watch them. Back in bed, in flannel up to my nose, I listen and listen. In my mind already the pipes have frozen and burst, water…

Wanting to be that place where inner and outer meet, this morning I’m listening to the river inside, also to the river out the window, river of sun and branch shadow, muskrat and mallard, heron, and the rattled cry of the kingfisher. Out there is a tree whose roots the river has washed so often…

AMMA IS COMING to live in Richmond,” Mom announced one night at the dinner table. Elizabeth and I looked at each other quickly. Which of us would have to give up her bedroom? Immediately I began constructing an argument in my mind, listing the reasons why Elizabeth’s room would be more suitable for Amma—it was farther…

Art and the Religious Sense To say that someone is “only human” is to say two things at once. We mean that person is flawed—and that this condition is no more than we should expect. Yet for all our awareness of human frailty and venality, we are haunted by visions of human flourishing, fullness rather…

You let your feet decide how to walk it, andante or andantino— only allow your breathing to become what wind is in the eucalyptus, now a susurrus, now a slow erasure of distractions. Cries from the soccer field and the street noise in Skala dissolve in the attention the stones require you give each footfall.…

To cure the hard habit of anger, eat an orange so slowly the juice spills from your fingers and waters the wild gladioli that purple the stones on high Kastelli. To learn patience, go with Ritsa to the little stoa of a shop in Skala, where old Pandalis weighs the small bags of chickpeas and…

Early light brightens the blue shutters, overspilling the foot of the bed we sleep in. It is quiet yet…deep and tidal when I hear the light say, You will not be given to do everything you want. I remain quiet, as nearly poised as the edge of salt in the air that fills the room.…