Reginald Gibbons

Make Me Hear You

by Reginald Gibbons

When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, "Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together." Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and the two of them, just married, would go fishing in the evening from the banks of the Pearl, the green stream in Mt. Olive, Mississippi. A year of that — quiet aloneness together after supper, things each showed the other, the bed turned down — and then Curtis's father came to live with them in their tiny house and while Curtis was away at work in the mill the old man would find his way out to the yard and have fits, twirling around, falling, so she'd have to pick him up and carry him back inside, and that was how they lived till Curtis died, and then his father. The pain that Lera wouldn't cry of now is like what I'm now the cause of: the things gone in time that you and I held only as sweet memories of towns, walks, rivers, beds, kingdoms, I took away a second time when I killed your hopes — and mine, and mine — for more sweet days to come, and I left that best time locked in the past. Dead Curdiss is Lera's old ghost who's flown with her into every day, the lost chance to live alone with him as he was and could have been, and you're the ghost who'll fly alongside me into the ruins and rooms I decided we would never share again — hovering up just when you see the thing you want to show me, and unable to make me hear you, unable to hear me say back to you, Oh, love, I would never have seen that without you.

Copyright © Reginald Gibbons

This poem was published in the Fall 1983 issue of Ploughshares. It was also included in the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, 1985 (page 215).

It occurs to me now that this poem is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to see more of in poetry. I'm guessing the poet is revealing something of himself in this poem but if he isn't it doesn't take away from the authenticity of the experience I have as a reader of the poem. The people in the poem suffer in understandable ways, and I feel compassion for them even though I myself have not experienced what they have gone through/are going through. The poem features memories of loving relationships, and the speaker of the poem is inflicting pain on him/her self by regretting the decision to end a relationship. I like the emotional honesty though, and I like the suggestion here that relationships don't end they just take on another form. Mr. Gibbons teaches at Northwestern University, and you can see more of him at his Northwestern website.