Dobby Gibson lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His poems appear in New England Review, Crazyhorse, Another Chicago Magazine, Third Coast, Spout and Conduit. Long Fence Sunrise First there was a horrible storm followed shortly thereafter by a storm, and when ultimately did we emerge from our homes only old couches slouched there half-buried in the snowmelt beneath some redundant dramaturgy of morning sun. We the otherwise nude had been inside, pleading with one another, laughing, using our tongues, then dazed on our own front stoop by the day’s blank announcement: even winter itself is dying. The traffic reports had finally broadcast what they meant to say all along, "Stay the hell home," so we soon fled to any place where a lonesome tractor might have sputtered out halfway into a field and covered itself in a turtleneck of rust, forcing all who drove past to measure from a distance the cosmic American puzzle: beauty half about the showboat dying, half about the weird hay bales too big for any known mouth. We had been on all fours, praying, coupling mightily, looking for lost buttons. First there was a storm malleting a roaming solo of lousy xylophone. First there was a storm we knew to be quelled the moment another hurled some newer precipitation at our feet. There were many storms, a few that we chased. There was the sound of banjos picking hellfire bluegrass, then the sound of banjos never to be played again. Morning Before Light Of all possible things to be desired in this world of all possible things, what bathes exclusively in the tungsten backlight of plastic signage at the corner of Selby and Snelling is $ALE$MAN WANTED. And of all possible things to be hurled into a face this morning it is a darkness and cold violence of water spit from above, a confessional wind that shamelessly elicits any response it craves. And whether torn from this or the tearer, and whether scared by this or the terror of the sky that eyes cannot plum, there is nothing I can do but reach down into pockets sewn in another land for no particular hand but still holding the keys to what I can only afford to rent. And would now give anything to be inside of instead of illicit and shivering, going to work in the hand-me-down winter rain I was never made for but still can’t dismiss as never made for me. Kinetiscope of a Sneeze It’s impossible to make much hope out of all this ruined foliage, out of anything people already have too much of, plastic bags sopped black in the curbside. So the first thing you do is try not to, trying to remember a time before it was like this, forced to publicly swallow your own warfare. Like being passionately dropped to the bathroom tiles, breeze rattling storm windows as if it didn’t know any better, imminent detonation of the to-the-belly mouth, the to-the-mouth mouth. Holding your breath, it’s never before been October this suddenly. Outside there is a leaf that has stained the sidewalk the color of an old bruise. And this is what the morning’s mapped, electrical zodiac could never have forecasted: while we were longing for these leaves, the leaves were longing for these trees. And the trees, now leafless, now checking us into our little motels of despair, just stand there combing skies soon to bring snows already elsewhere in rehearsals of plummet. They say it may have been the last thing you ate, the last where you breathed, though even science guesses. There isn’t anything that couldn’t end this violently fast: what you were about to say to your dinner guest, beloved, self. And it wasn’t until the moment you were sure it was jailing you in a kind of forever that you learned all is long past and they’re once again blessing you for creating what you secretly tried to destroy. Once More, with Feeling With her on the lip of last summer’s pool it was as if I had peeked at the final page of a mystery novel I once saw as a movie, though remained still unable to foresee whodunit. There we shivered beneath an eclipse, the sky’s dime winked to the flutter of leaves, hearts, kicks. Naked ankles dangled. Water stopped lithic, the fragile jewel of a throat’s lone droplet, sopped handprints on a skirted thigh, neck the smell of dissolving tact. Any moment recalled is built of such impossibilities, though where else to heap my mawkish slush? Where else to say breasts were like being fervently remembered by two foreign dignitaries I knew I had never met? Or the sundress couldn’t have been less of a container? How else to forget we split by postcard? The skull is such a shoddy observatory: her hair now somehow redder, stars bigger than Texas just stars, yesterday’s comet a frozen match strike and the lab coats saw it coming all along. Now science tells us weeping in the rain makes us forty percent sadder, this according to more sensitive research. Now blooms of toothwart. All of this to say she had me bundled in hasps, knurled, knuckled, ludic, that first kiss by the pool a bullet in my shoulder from some old duel. All of this to say the people I have loved I have cooked at least one breakfast. At this point be thankful the poem doesn’t stink of formaldehyde, so much clutter preserved: if not a snapshot of her and me gnarled in the den, at least one of that clashing davenport. Throw pillows. Half gainer. Skinny dip. Yesterday scientists released a leap second from the atomic clock like a healed pelican and time stood still as it has on only four occasions, none when any met their beloved. Yesterday a beautiful woman rode a bike while I drank coffee in a hat. Today there’s all this catching up to do. Receiving Line Despite what all those religions think, steeples aren’t that much closer to God, though surely He would rather the occasional cross jab into the nape of His floofy mattress than all these phone poles, arranged as they are in such an obvious worship of one another, like athletes. Probably for even the slowest atheists this week has been track-and-field, a vault replayed slo-mo over some enormous precipice of thaw: it’s luncheon-meat cold and even winter rain isn’t, like, totally anything new, but it hurls itself at us like a smashed chandelier, pocks the lawn’s snow into a kind of tapioca and now, suddenly, were groceries sought? And if not artichoke, what to name this yearning, the one that sends me to the street with so many keys? The fresh produce of desire is thusly bagged separately where its functions are misunderstood and subatomic like hockey. Winter shadows cast dumbly to the pavement as if from bored skydivers, deciphered quickly like the tiny books sold near the register, and just out of sight, a drawer full of mittens unpaired, abandoned umbrellas, tremendous galoshes, a rare form of beauty undependent upon its frame that the otherwise blistered long ago hysterically sings in its historical garden, plainly, like a good toast. We all wonder how a single wire holds simultaneous conversation, what it is here that seems to have fallen from its shelf, or if that is precisely the point: among the shelfless, the tragedy of the putting-back is that none know where to start. On the one hand the rules were thrown out, on the other so much more is expected of us.