Reginald Gibbons
An Apple Pip
after a few words in Paul Celan
A breath-stealing, blood-
thickening heaven-heat
comes down on us when things
are worst. Some concord that
even a calendar with
binoculars could not see from here
might be attained, yet
the same infinities
of the unspeakable that we’ve
tried to end, or at least apprehend
fully, before now,
move nearer to us all, and we
remember that our local
cosmos always arrives
to contort and twist our
insufficiencies and seethes
with nearly numberless
moral aches and flawed actions,
and yet we search for a light of
good intent that might bend
in the not miraculous dark as it
gleams on one shiny apple pip.
Reginald Gibbons reads “An Apple Pip”
Reginald Gibbons has published eleven books of poems, most recently Renditions (Four Way Books, 2021). He has published volumes of translated poems, including work of Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, a number of Mexican poets (in the anthology New Writing from Mexico), as well as odes and fragments of Sophocles (Princeton UP), and with co-translator Charles Segal, Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Bakkhai. His novel Sweetbitter won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and will be reprinted in a new pb edition in 2023 (JackLeg Press).