Sample Poems by David Rigsbee
At Todi
Clouds merge with stone.
Pigeons grip moss that trims the stone.
As hard as their roots, trees
rise like statues, and the grass
they dapple in the short run
the hills pick up as an effect, and spread.
At a curve’s far reach, you meet
a shrine placed by shrewd peasants
to defeat expectation:
energies are already transforming
hard trees into their harmless shadows.
Never Forget
A standard dove would gargle
all day, gnats dangle their pulsing clusters
like water-balloons. And the ground
be overrun with ants and scarabs
rearranging the earth. Figs
about to touch ground from the most extended
branch would note
how the necropolis corrects dissolution
with architecture. How domes
rewrite hills, and fields, grown and cut,
reduce the river’s pull
where gravity is quietest and most
conspiratorial, a drift
content that a single painter restore it
from allegory to realism. Clouds
would process their variations
across the countryside all day.
What both bird and butterfly did would go
by the same name. And that ecstasy
pouring from the stone would pass
through wheat’s variations,
when the mower appeared mounting the hill,
its red dome and puff of smoke
so like the scythes of the painters.
Into the Wall
An anvil-shaped cloud
spreads its iron shadow
across the hill adjacent to our town.
As on a floor viewed upside down,
other clouds, in turn, suggest
figures of the moment,
requiring only the arrival
of the next bit of future to cancel
the suggestion. The struggle
is ancient: clouds’ agon drives the painter
into the wall, attempting impossible
compressions proper to time beyond
a lifetime. Here, where the sound
of a scooter merges with a wasp’s nest,
a pack of flies beats up a swallow—
until the next frame. Or the classical
head turns with its look
of a god disappearing into time:
things are as they are,
turning in middle air,
and as they will be,
emerging from the rock.
Campanile
The stones they shouldered above
stay above: their quarters are still
the plain, impersonally stuccoed flats
snail-clustered across the valley.
They know up always ended where
a campanile diffused sound and figure
meant to charm God, or else
to arrest Him. The faces are familiar:
Mussolini had one—and Gramsci—
below-wall faces atop solid, compact builds.
Today the sky is repeating something about
its clouds, how they were one stimulus
for the adulation of the flesh,
for Fra Angelico’s heaven-limiting
bodies. Any heaven from this moment
takes on the likeness of bodies
who passed from the labors demanded
of stones, and rose again, matching hills
in whose folds and valleys swallows
making their barrel-and-rollout
menace the tassled wheat.