Homestead Bird’s-eye, as in mid-flight, midair And slightly upriver, The bridge in the foreground And its watered-down reflection Parallel to the picture plane. The sky fluffed up with clouds. Not quite Giotto’s God’s-eye view In which the world gets seen From all sides. Homestead Is crowded rows of houses, Steel mills billowing Identical plumes of smoke, Bent level toward the horizon-- One of his vernacular, Detail-driven landscapes, Description like composition A way to lead the eye around it, Taking in the features Of the “industrial sublime.” Scumble and glaze came later. Here the world is local colour, The way he first applied it, Painting scenes on the sides Of boxcars during lunchbreaks At work. A job he’d likely Thought of while brushing in The slow freights he’s strung Along either side of the river. He’s got its slurry just right, And the massive scale Of the open hearths, pikestaffs Of the blast furnace chimneys. 1929. The economy About to tank as if in another country. Robert Gibb Robert Gibb is the author of Sightlines (Poetry Press, 2021), his thirteenth full-length poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Prize Americana for Poetry. Other books include Among Ruins, which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017, After, which won the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for 2016, and The Origins of Evening (Norton, 1997), which was a National Poetry Series selection. He has been awarded two NEA Fellowships, a Best American Poetry, a Pushcart Prize and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei and Strousse Awards. A new book, Pittsburghese, has won 2023’s Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Michigan State University Press.
1 Comment
7/19/2023 11:40:04 am
I love how the poem takes off from the description into the date (1929) and the implications for the economy, the doom about to come.
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February 2025
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