Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
In the Picture, poems by David Rigsbee.
In the Picture
When the dandelion has conquered all, or
my deep suspicion as we sit to eat:
I hear these things inside my head.
What scenarios and tales–age
and love and injury–trumping each other!
A mockingbird’s feathered border
climbs a limb. By the garbage patio
are these same feathers forcibly separated
from the body. If one were to perpetrate
some fraud, pretending hatred, say,
or boredom a whole life long,
only to recant on one’s deathbed,
which would be true: that or the truth
(realizing how you leaned into
the fraud, shaded the fraud with time)?
If I awoke each morning to a mockingbird
only to find it a woodpecker in age,
wasn’t the mockingbird also—
perhaps even more so—in the picture?
Wouldn’t the fraud, suspending itself
over the abyss of the truth,
come to seem lovely there
in the morning of an old man?
Door Frame
When the sun hits that same spot
as it comes down out of a cloud,
more attic-haunted kid than muscular Apollo,
and burns the water like that,
the seabird’s cry, the spreading city,
the religious water, the duck’s yodel,
all step forward to ease
the difference between order
and a thing not understood.
They hang for a moment
in hardness and happiness
until the sun has slipped away
like someone at a party. Where he was
is now the door frame,
where before were guests in conversation,
animated, drinks in hand.
Mounted
Much I couldn’t get right:
names of local trees, for instance,
of a bird that perched on the skillet
handle, kinds of rain on a day
charged with the splendor.
An old caravel unspools a white wake
as it trudges up the shoreline.
A maid boards a transport up
into the hills where there is work.
Smoke and sun rush on her face.
“Stand on the stick,” the boy said
looking up at me.
It was a log between trees,
trees whose names I didn’t know,
but I did, and saddled up.
Bakery
A man kicked loose the rubber doorstop
to a chilly bakery, his sandaled feet
trim but blue. A man and woman bend
their heads over coffee whose steam
rises in the space between them.
A crow discovers that to fly straight
into the wind is to be hustled backwards.
Several try like Ninjas that the Master
orders against a supervillain. Each tries,
peels off, and dives out of the screen.
Bakery goods beckon from their trays
like students on the first day of class
positioned to see the new kid whose reputation
preceded him just when he thought anonymity
would at least get him through lunch.
The wind accelerates and the limbs twist
to see the pack of stock cars race past
the grandstand, and in turning their eyes fall
on others like themselves, not in the race
but jumping in the same spot, inspired
by the hot smell of gas and oil.
Reporting to the Martians
I watched the light line coming down the house
plank by plank, until first the collared trumpets
then the stems of the daffodils were at full
illumination, and all were revealed
with their shadows, like personal assistants,
connected but standing off to the side.
We must report to the Martians how it is
with us. I was leaving the faculty club
and the faces trying to make their way,
eager, agreeable, or making a point,
were as clueless as could be to the full glare
on the rain pipe and the white that traced
the window around, and that bush pruned
to next to nothing, roses and camellias too.
© David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others.
In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2024.