Balance Sheet

Today, numbers --
Brave soldiers, ranked and ordered,
Aligned and at attention
In a phalanx of
Rows and columns--
Await my orders.

Sometimes at night,
As i lie in bed,
i can feel them,
From miles away on my desk,
Standing at attention:
They exist merely to inform,
They hold a place
That represents an idea
That has a value.
Their purpose is their meaning.

They do not waver.
They do not sigh
Slouch
Sulk
Beweep their outcast state.

They wait for an ordering presence
To mobilize the meaning
They merely symbolize.

Sometimes, on my commute,
My sight pulls back,
My mind's eye rises,
And i see myself
As i see them:

Held within a cell,
Waiting to motivate a higher mind
Toward action.

Naught but my soul at attention,
Only the meaning i represent
Held forth,
A dagger or
Dandelion.

Within the confines
Of row and column,
Worlds explode into strenuous
Life.

i do my part:

i stand still in my cell
And dance.


--Mr. Gobley

Late Summer

Today the clouds scudded by like glass-bottomed boats.

This afternoon, a few dozen raindrops
The size of grapes
Ended their brief lives, only
To enter a new one
As a stain
Or a pilgrim
In a puddle.

Tonight, the crickets sing
Over the condenser unit

And fans blow away
The house's introspective heat.

August:

There can never be a sweeter moment,
Whose cool evenings
And humid days
Promise death,
Then life everlasting:

The palimpsest of repose,
The Garden of Eden
Whose gates go unguarded:

The angels with fiery swords
Have tickets to the game,
And afterwards,
A party
On the swankiest
Ring of Saturn.

--Mr. Gobley

The thinking person's tree

Its branches arc over the house like the spokes of an umbrella.

Its seedpods clog the gutters in Spring; its leaves shelter the house from
Summer's withering glare.

In Fall, its leaves dance and die; again the gutters cradles --
Not sparks of what might of been, but
Embers of what gloriously, patiently
Was.

Its roots explore the foundation.
Its branches praise the heavens.

In winter, the thinking person's tree
Withdraws into itself,
And the branches appear sclerotic
Against the gray vault
Of Perihelion.

Today, as on all days,
It simply is.
Thrusting down, praising up,

Thick with life,
Always prepared.
Swathed in symbiosis
With my fragile abode
(Whose bones are planed
From fellow trees),

The thinking person's tree
Always waits, but stays present;
Always is rooted
And is always on the move;

Always loves what it shelters,
And gently, unapologetically
Uses
What it loves.

--Mr. Gobley

Done

It is wonderful to be a student again.

Now i remember:

Summer smells of greening promise --

Chlorophyll and melanin --

And the expansion of the soul back into

Something called "life,"

An end to shuffling herds in stairwells

And dark evenings buried in books.

i remember, too, what striving and promise are:

miniatures of the Universe's expansion into self.

i return to my diurnal identity,

a little older

but a little further from death.

--Mr. Gobley

Late Night City Sounds

A sigh, perhaps;
Even a motor
Can sound contemplative

When all that is behind it
Is the susurration
Of a vent shaft
Or the
Plaint
Of an idling bus

All i listen for
Is contained
Within symphonies
Of metal and stone

All i hear
Breathes
Against a quilt of night
And dreams
Of tomorrow's
Exhaust.

--Mr. Gobley

Five O'Clock Somewhere

Quitting time is a small, delightful death.
Cars exhale. People, too.
The sun begins to retire, in this latitude,
From the rigors of forcing Spring
On a frozen hemisphere.

Birds --
Who exclaim, and who hail the morning Sun --
Also fly home, somewhere, when the Sun does;
Wedges of wings turning,
Leaving, arcing and returning,
Vanishing.

At Five O'clock
In March
Where i live,
The monochrome is
Coloring into its gentle death.

At home, there is light.

In my mind,
Which til now hibernated,
A ray of languid light enters the cave.

--Mr. Gobley

Thaw

Blood rediscovers the end of my fingertips,
The tips of my toes.

The bone-ache of deep cold
Is dipped in a shallow, steaming pool
Of promise.

Somewhere, a cardinal sings;
And beyond that,
The sigh of the expressway
Arcs higher into the
Suburban air,
Comes down more gently,
Without icicles shattering
Around it.

The trees point less angrily
At their parent sky,
And people stand taller,
No longer hunching their shoulders
Over their hearts.

Time turns from blade to blossom
In tiny increments,
Like the growing of an eyelash.

And i rejoice in the cloud of breath
That rises from my day,
In gratitude -- and relief --
Toward the day's
Maker.

--Mr. Gobley

the breach

The black whale
That shot from the sea
And thundered back down
Was master of all his universes:

The liquid world could not contain him;

The air rushed to greet him, filling his lungs with new life,
Hurried to sustain his brief flight;

The solid world -- the world of our flesh and feeling --

Utterly transformed by his might.

All I can ask is to live one moment like him;

To briefly launch into that element just beyond my reach;

That benign and yet ominous Other that both inspires and eludes me;

So that my moment of mastery might descend with me again, into the iridescent deep

Where memory and meaning both reside.

-- Mr. Gobley

Old Man on Campus

He moves among the young
Pulled by air currents
Pushed by gestures:
He has the presence
Of cigar smoke
And something of its odor.

He lingers amidst the library stacks
Like Bellow's ghost,
Looking for pages to live in.

He interrogates academic journals,
Demanding that they divulge
What only he can decipher;
Kidnaps orphaned lattes
From the basement coffee shop,
Devours the Science Times
That beckons
Stained and matted
From the counter.

His briefcase, never open,
Bears the same battered manuscript
Over which he labored,
Through which he breathed,
During the years of his
Academic apprenticeship.

When i come close to pitying him,
i look close until i see
The smile of utter solitude
Crease his face:

The bliss of solipsism
Is his;
He is an anchorite
Amidst the young --
A minor god,
Hurling bolts of erudition
Into a sea of ink.

--Mr. Gobley

Early dusk

This is a miracle, too:

How nightfall,
In its heaviness,
Falls as lightly,
As freely,

As day dawns.

How watching reveals nothing
Until it reveals
That all is hidden.

How darkness, through the window,
Reflects oneself back to oneself,
And how daylight at last
Causes the self to vanish.

No light shines on my soul
But that it slowly dims,
No darkness descends upon me
But that its arc swings gently back
Toward redemption.

I breathe, I dream, I slowly die;
And all for this -- and only this -- am I.

--Mr. Gobley

In Praise of a Woman, Running

No form ever graced the Universe,
No figure ever spoke to the angels
Until yours sped past.

Your feet touched the ground as a sort of compromise;
You moved as if time and gravity were mere concepts,
And bones and ligaments fashioned
Like bow and arrow.

i cannot forget the ease,
Cannot approximate the joy,
Will not understand
The lightness of being

Expressed in your stride,
Until I have died.

--Mr. Gobley

Meditation on a Sunset from Behind a Window

Without biting bugs
And the territorial shrieks of gulls,
This is little more than a flat-screen TV.

And yet:

There is a cricket secreted in the ceiling tiles,
Singing to a newly determined storm;
And there is the semaphore of the rain
On the old roof

To remind me
That i am not alone here,
Not all alone.

i live on an island,
weave dreams on a prairie,
build boxes in the suburbs,

And watch water and sky
rise and fall

Through the great window
of memory.

--Mr. Gobley

Prayer for a Sunday Evening

My bones ache from the pleasure
Of wasting time.

And from working in the garden,
And walking into town.

From the sledding hill,
i saw a highway,
A forest,
And a world in no hurry.

On the way home,
i saw two children selling lemonade,
A dog trotting alongside her mistress,
And a father and daughter racing their bikes,
Laughing into the wind..

It was a world without ambition
And without enmity --
A small, fragile universe,
Shielded from itself
By a brief, benevolent window
Of the timeless.

i thank you,
Creator of Time,
For briefly, sweetly,
Making time
Go
Away.

--Mr. Gobley

Prayer for a Child Engaged in Sport

You cannot fail.

You live in a
Distilled elixir,
A concoction of hope
And riotous dreams
That causes us
To rise out of our seats
And shout.

O Great Life,
That it should let us drink
Such wonders
As this modest moment!

All your guides,
i first and foremost,
pray that in falling you rise
and in defeat you
overcome,

And that what wounds you suffer
Will scab over like glaciers
And move slowly
To the center of your being,

Where all defeat becomes song
And all sport
Conveys a hint of
The World to Come.

--Mr. Gobley

Prayer for When You Do Not Feel Ready

Dear Mover of Stillness:

The rush of time
Makes moments like leaves --

Unfurling slowly, they are suddenly everywhere,
Then, even more suddenly,
Gone.

i fall helplessly behind:
Time has no particles,
Only waves;
No moments,
Only a stream.

Make me like the rock in the stream --
Let me bend the tide to my ceaseless will,
Until i am no more.

Or, perhaps,
Make me like the stream --
Transparent,
Still,
Present;

And yet, for all this,
i know
That You have made me
Both stream and rock,

And in time i will embrace
The flow of Presence
Over the stillness at my center.

Let that time be
Now.

-- Mr. Gobley

What the Garden Said

Thank you for scratching my back,
Tending to my wounds,
Cleansing my pores,
Nourishing my being.

All that remains for you to do
Is to recognize that i smile at you
Each day.

i wait for you to see me --
Essence of me,
Presence of me,
Beingness of me
That reaches toward you
With the whorled and trifoliate,
Tunnels toward you with
The fibrous and adventitious

(All i ask:
Look beyond the rim
Of your morning cup
And see me!),

Keeps becoming
And becoming
And waiting for you to
Gasp in recognition:

i live not next to you
But within you.
We grow
Into
Each other.

The lobilia
And the columbine
Merely add flourishes
To what i constantly proclaim:

i am you.
Smile and reside within me,
And together we will
Reach upwards.

--Mr. Gobley

What Thin Is

Thin is skin.
Skin is thin, thinking ink.

In this, i sink:

i sin, kiss, shit,
hit things;

i sit.

This is it:
It is,
It isn't.

i stink,
sigh,
tisk:
i think, sinking.

It is knit
in skin.

It's high;
it's thin;

it thinks;
it sings.

It is i.

--Mr. Gobley

A meditation on lethargy

My soul has been baked
into a pudding.

i eat, standing over the kitchen sink,
looking out at the back yard,
and wish to remain there all day,
watching rabbit denude the garden
and blossoms sing of their own passing.

At times like this, i wish only to move
as the current of life will move me.

i have no designs
on reaching or grasping:

merely breathing,
and being,
are achievement enough.

Perhaps this isn't lethargy after all:
it may just be the call
of the corpuscles

The wild cry of the nucleotides

The singing of cells
Through the arches
Of tendon,

Morse code
Tapped onto
The wall of my slumbering soul:

Live, live, live . . .

-- Mr. Gobley

Getting Un-Lonely

This time, i mean it:
i will not rely on the mountains
To soothe my soul
Or on music
To provide a soundtrack
For my life,
Or on you
To make me feel worthy.

Suddenly, i find the mountains
to be piles of rocks and weeds,
the music to be merely the earnest
vibrations of the strings and the hopes
and the thirsty egos of the players.

And you:

You have come and gone.
What have you left me with?
Mere mountains;
Mere music.

A thirsty ego;
Nothing to quench the thirst.

Great heaps of nothing;
Vast mirages of beauty
That vanish as soon as
They appear.

If i promise to come to you,
You do not answer.
If i sing to you,
You do not smile.

All i have of you
Is the mountain
And the instrument.

i must climb,
i must play and sing.

And it is only then --
Straining my muscles,
Vibrating the strings --
That you appear to me,
Smiling,
Open,
Here,
And Here --

Being with me.

i am rendered
un-lonely.

--Mr. Gobley

The Blessing of a Beach House

We perched, like ants, on a crust of earth,
On a mound of your making.
We asked, meekly --
"Can we stay for a moment?"

You were kind.

Thousands of turns of the globe,
The gyrations and wobbles of the planet,
Have been made plain to us;
Creatures, and Creation,
Have become our friends.

The plainest messages of time and tide
Have been laid at our feet.
We have grown up in the sun,

Found our way through the bays and inlets
Toward something greater
Than any city street:

Everything is busy being and becoming,
And we, who are so often too busy to notice,
Come here to just be, and to become.

We are pelicans and plovers,
And dolphins and egrets;
We are Germans and locals.

We find that Nature is omnivorous,
And we are omnipresent.
When we are here, even if alone,
We are never lonely.

--Mr. Gobley