~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of September 2023 ~
To Anna, On Her Retirement
Is this what you’ve been
imagining you could discard:
the petty supervisors clucking
about their neurotic fiefdoms;
rubrics, memos, misogyny,
emails, emails, more emails?
A friend described her passage
as “rewirement,” and it’s amazing
the difference a letter makes,
all your beleaguered neurons
shedding buckets of cortisol—
see how they unclench from
“doing, doing, doing” into simply
being. The mountain across
the valley isn’t doing anything,
it just is, a gorgeous astonishment
every sunrise when I open
my eyes. As are you. The trees
in the orchard, sure, they bear
fruit, but mostly they radiate
gratitude for having found
a home here, on this hillside
as you have too, reveling
in healthful elements: air,
water, rich soil, good friends
the churn of seasons, a circle
of community. You have always
been loveable, but now you have
time to savor this hard-won truth.
Taste it, Beloved, let it wash
over you like a sunset’s tender
afterglow. And welcome!
*
Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Poet Lore, RHINO, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
Abstinent
How the body was so coy
about naming what it really wanted.
How the return of the peepers’ wild song
proclaims this visceral season thawed.
How we’d been waiting, stuck
for what we didn’t realize we missed.
An aroma, an agenda,
a stirring under a quilt of leaf rot.
In this bed, skin warms against skin,
the mucky waft of ripening earth.
*
Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Cutthroat, Lunch Ticket, RHINO, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.
