TWO ESTATES, by David Rigsbee

Last month I received a letter from David Rigsbee. His friend Shelby Stephenson had suggested he write me about his new book. Although I've never met David, I know that he is a prolific and splendid poet. That he reviews regularly for the online journal The Cortland Review, that he has traveled widely---. But there is so much more to know about David Rigsbee, and if you go to his website, you will begin to see what I mean.

And if you google him, you will find interviews and all sorts of interesting items to keep you locked to your computer screen for all of an evening, if not longer. I encourage you to do so!



(David Rigsbee, Paris, 2004)

David, who teaches at Mount Olive College in Mounta Olive, NC, has a new book out from Cherry Grove Collections, and this is what the editor of the series as to say about his work:
The elegant poems of David Rigsbee’s Two Estates evoke landscape and history, art and memory, in densely sculpted lines:

David is the author of six previous collections, including Cloud Journal (Turning Point Books, 2008) and The Dissolving Island (BkMk Press, 2003). His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many others. He is the recipient of grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Virginia Commission on the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and The Academy of American Poets.



(David with his daugter Makaiya Bullitt-Rigsbee in Washington, DC, 2001)

Here are a few poems from Two Estates.

Under Cancer


On his birthday, my father the idea
greets my mother the flesh in a dream.
My father the stone draws me up a foreign hill
where a keyhole focuses an arbor
on a basilica in which he will not be found
or remembered. My father the wind
gives my face what is denied both the foot
and the mind, sweeping its words with a hand
broom, among which will be found,
like a nugget, his caesura.
Then I pause, drawing breath,
and walk to the ledge where my father
the evening greets me in the darkening
branches of a pine.

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.



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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.



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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.



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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.