REVIEW AMERICANA

 

Fall 2018

Volume 13, Issue 2

https://americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/fall_2018/gibb.htm




ROBERT GIBB

 

 

Landscape Painting, Watercolor Class

 

The fields were a ply of ground lines already—
Thickets with deckled edges, rows of torn rags

Where the combine lopped off stalks of corn,
The dry-brush of the distant hedges—

All of it running to the Kittatinny Ridge.
The art would be in our various approaches

To rendering it transparent, apprenticed
To the medium’s one-and-done technique.

“Acutest at its vanishing,” Wallace Stevens said.
He could have been referring to nature,

How landscape arrives as a subject for watercolor
About the same time the steam engine

Starts stacking smoke through the countryside,
Factories now fueled with village looms. 

Landskip the term they’d used back then,
Marking the transplanted start of the genre,

Before Turner and Constable
And the painters of the Hudson River School.

At least that’s what lay behind our washes
And finishing, brush-tip details—

Rose hips and seed heads, the scattered silks
Of sunlight on the fields.

We’d been taught about the Chinese as well,
Landscapes in which the numinous was bathed

In mist. “Don’t look. See,” we were urged.
The idea was for each of us to find a vantage

And take it up, independently,
Where others had prepared the way.

 

 

Orthogonal Drawing

 

Intro to Industrial Design,
Kutztown State College, 1966

 

Almost Cubist, this tidy
L-shaped depositing   
Of an object on a page—
Side, front, and top—

Each view next in line.
Each object a set,
Mechanical, orthogonal,
In the same measured way.

Each flanked by those
Bracketed dimensions,
Marginalia of arrows
Tipped at every edge.

(Edges the lines
The eye finds in nature,
The teacher had said.)
You needed to follow

Procedure so carefully,
Setting down those elevations,
That ink never bled
Beneath the T-square

Or any other errors
Were left in view.
Including their erasure.
Including any traces of you.

 

 

Two Views in Error

 

                          i.
      Chemistry Set (c. 1957),
        A.C. Gilbert Company

Red, I remember, and triptych,
It opened on a world of wonders:
Burner, flasks, the chemicals
In identical spice-rack bottles.

But where my cousin once loved
To fashion his test-tube
Abracadabras, he now stashed
That hoard of 1940s porn

Brought home by some G.I. Joe—
The hackneyed passions
Of slabs of meat
In each Kodaked tableau—

A world in which he was learning
New sets of elements,
The number of basic metals
Become that of the deadly sins.

                         ii.
“The Temptation of St. Anthony”
    Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1516)

A swarm of snouts and talons.
Who but a saint would be tempted
By a vision like the one
Grunewald loosed upon his,

Modeling that antlered goblin
And cudgel-wielding hawk,
The belly-up frog being flailed
By its mad, half-naked rider . . .

All the fever-dream menagerie
Of the citadel spirit under siege,
Or so it’s been made to believe.
And the scapegoat body?

What if, instead of that host
Of grotesques, he saw lovers
Stirring in their petal-laden bed,
Almond as moonlit Jerusalem?

 

 

Hummingbird Journal

 

i.

The constellated blossoms in the April woods,
Their white petals preface to that small
Jeweled bird which served as talisman

For the Aztecs, for Frida Kahlo as the spent
Thermal pendant in her “Self-Portrait
with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird,”

The wings tacked flat below her throat.
Lush green foliage bowering her shoulders.
The thorn-tips she painted drawing blood.

ii.

When the maple by my window leafs out, 
I’ll hang that drip-feed of nectar from a limb
And wait for the first jade blurs
To hone in on it, migrating from the Andes
Across 10 million years, their feathers
Entering creation when the first flowers did.

iii.

And as talisman for Joseph Cornell, whose
Bell-jarred hummer, prismed in flight,
Gazes at the satellite cut-and-pasted above it.

iv.

Some perch for their fluttering pit-stops.
Some can’t sit still, hovering,
Winged with the turbulence at their backs.
Some rock in place like pumpjacks.

Skittering or skittish or rapidly lapping,
The throat with a pulse of its own,
They all hang fire till those pneumatic-tube
Lift-offs bolt them back into the blue.

v.

The purse of days trailing in their wakes.



Coda


i.

First that iridescent, metal-flake glimmer
Darting about the flowering boughs,

Its reactor-core compactness,
The air-brushed blur of the wings.   

How deftly he’s been siphoning the nectar
From the silk tree’s feathery tufts—

An intermittence, fletched and jade,
Quenched by the sip, not the gulp. 

ii.

Then, above the river, not Quetzalcoatl
But a red-tailed hawk dangling a snake

From its talons. An iteration, I like to think,
As with the god called wind over water.

iii.

And now the little gales of the swallowtails
Flitting obsidian among the foxgloves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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