"After Reading Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life On My 49th Birthday" by Dobby Gibson

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April 21, 2021 

After Reading Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life On My 49th Birthday


Dobby Gibson

On a dull December day it’s never noon 
more briefly, though what a relief 
to look around and realize our lies, in the long run,
won’t last long. 

                        I feel like the nail 
holding up someone else’s painting.
My thoughts are the loose thing 
in the dishwasher only I can hear.
When I say, Snow, what will become of this world?
it says, I was not taught future tense.

                        Through the window, 
after the heavy storm, I can follow mysterious 
paw prints to the spot along the fence 
where, in summer, the neighbors like to whisper.
They’ve taken their secrets inside.
It’s left a silence so complete, so free 
of ambition, it feels possible to know forgiveness, 
which hammered thinner than memory
carries a brighter light.

Copyright © 2021 by Dobby Gibson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 21, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“After a snowstorm, there’s a stillness that hints at a grace we can’t quite access. It becomes possible to imagine the unburdening of the self. Hence my debt here to Issa, and also to Milosz’s poem written after Issa, who wrote his haibun after Basho’s. Which is to say that poems, like birthdays, are intensely serial. I’ll never know all the voices speaking through me.”
Dobby Gibson

Dobby Gibson is the author of four books of poems, most recently Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press, 2019). He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Little Glass Planet
(Graywolf Press, 2019)



from “Thoreau” by Cole Swensen
read more
“The Snow (Stands to My Waist), (Like) Me (Falls Still)” by Jill Osier
read more

Thanks to Jane Hirshfield, author of Ledger (Knopf, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A about Hirshfield’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year
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