October 30, 2022
Spent the morning editing the new book manuscript (editing is way more fun than writing the thing in the first place, but I can’t put a comma where it belongs for love or money). By noon it was in the high 50s and sunny, and it seemed virtually a requirement to head out in the kayak.
It was worth it. The harbor looked like a lake on a perfect late fall day with that low autumn light that nineteenth-century painters flocked to Maine to capture.
Back to editing tonight, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Heather commas, semi colons, and —- in the morning necessitate an afternoon in the sun. Enjoy, relax, and kayak back into our lives whenever you choose to be our modern St. Francis, We await your guidance.
Heather Cox Richardson, you have enriched our minds by elucidating the weave of our country's racial and political rope past and present. Today you bring us autumnal beauty with your photograph in orange, white, green and gold on land and reflected on the water. Thank you for this week's bundle of reality.
For the Chipmunk in My Yard
BY ROBERT GIBB
I think he knows I’m alive, having come down
The three steps of the back porch
And given me a good once over. All afternoon
He’s been moving back and forth,
Gathering odd bits of walnut shells and twigs,
While all about him the great fields tumble
To the blades of the thresher. He’s lucky
To be where he is, wild with all that happens.
He’s lucky he’s not one of the shadows
Living in the blond heart of the wheat.
This autumn when trees bolt, dark with the fires
Of starlight, he’ll curl among their roots,
Wanting nothing but the slow burn of matter
On which he fastens like a small, brown flame.
***
Robert Gibb
b. 1946
Poet Robert Gibb was born in Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Homestead Trilogy, a cycle of poems detailing the history and culture of a steel-working town. The trilogy consists of the poetry collections The Origins of Evening (1997), selected by Eavan Boland for the National Poetry Series; The Burning World (2004); and World over Water (2007). Gibb’s other collections include Fugue for a Late Snow (1993) and What the Heart Can Bear: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1979–1993 (2009).
The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gibb has also won a Pushcart Prize and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.