Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Hardly Waking from High School, I See You Now

— for Peter Kline as Peer Gynt

Back and back happens

without effort, your voice

 

undulating. All in green

went my love, flying

 

clear-throated,

over gorse and pith.

 

Urging us

past convention, without reins.

 

Your spare frame agile,

aerodynamic, lifting

 

us to leap over school’s hockey fields,

a soaring reindeer stag, evoking

 

mythical alpine huts, and me,

as Solveig, loyally secret,

 

alert to you who saw me,

dreaming.

 

My silent sentences, heard. Held me,

held in revery.

 

Insistence

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s debut novel is The Promise of a Normal Life, (Arcade Publishing, Feb. 2023). Her poetry collections are Girl as Birch (2022), and Opinel (2015), Bauhan Publishing. Her work appears in the following: Agni; Barrow Street, Field; Green Mountains; Greensboro; Interim, Harvard; Massachusetts; Ocean State; Passengers; Salamander; Slate; Tupelo; and VerseDaily among others. She’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As Fulbright Scholar she taught in India. She taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years, then founded, and runs The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series.