Elegy Written Before the Fact
Floored, his head struck flush on the tiles,
hard enough to knock his Vietnam Vet cap off
and him so flat he barely budged
while a few of us hovered above him,
question-and-answer time. Drunk as though
from punches and down for the count,
he was certain he’d be fine and on his way
just as soon as he was back on his feet.
So we hauled him up and paused our talk
to watch his wobbly progress for the door,
watch him lurch into the little sideways trot
that brought him toppling over onto a chair.
“The body is the mind’s subconscious,”
a woman had said to me earlier that night,
making it seem a volitionless thing,
brute and symptomatic. And now
as if trying to prove her right, he sat there
in a stupor, letting loose the beer-fueled
waterfall that pooled about his feet.
Concussed, I wondered, or just plain drunk?
He wasn’t thrilled to see the EMS crew
or the follow-up cops who told us
he’d been on a bender ever since learning
that his riddled liver was killing him.
Now, it’s hangovers every morning—
light seeping through the ribs of the blinds—
the black holes of blackouts
which swallow up the nights before.
As for remembering, what’s the point?
Isn’t it enough that he wakes each day,
sooner or later, to that awful knowledge
he’s found he can live with only like this?
Robert Gibb is the author of 14 books, most recently, Pittsburghese (Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, 2023). Other books include Sightlines (Prize Americana in Poetry, 2019), Among Ruins (Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, 2017), After (Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, 2016), The Burning World (Miller Williams Poetry Prize, 2004) and The Origins of Evening (National Poetry Series, 1997). He has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an appearance in Best American Poetry, and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award (2012) and Strousse Award (2011).
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