Poem for an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber
Little glass planet,
I like picking you up.
As if I’m holding my own thought,
one blown molten with a puff
of some craftsman’s breath⏤is it still inside you?
You are a beautiful bauble it’s hard to imagine
anyone hurling you into the sea,
but eventually we all have a job to do.
I think of the early mornings and storm warnings
you braved to find the village dinner.
I don’t remember carrying you
home on the plane from Seoul,
crew dozing behind the cockpit door,
autopilot engaged⏤what were they dreaming of?
I don’t even know what shore
you washed up on: Busan, Incheon, Samcheok.
Are you glad we made you a home here so far
from the sea? is a question I won’t ask in case
your answer is the one you don’t want to give.
I love how perfectly you fit in my hand,
at first cold, and the way the morning looks
through you, as green and cloudy
as an unknown we no longer fear.
But I wouldn’t want to be held up
to the sun either, not because I’m a monster,
but because I, too, am transparent and trusting,
and mistake both for the truth.
Beneath our lives there are sordid undulations
and embraces brief and sweet,
a nearly invisible line connecting us to the fleet,
with every breath worth saving,
like the sip of air inside us
full of an old sea’s grace
or the ancient word hidden in our lungs
that once released back into the wild
will finally set us free.
-Dobby Gibson
Someone told me a story, possibly apocryphal, that Robert Bly, at the height of his Bly-ness, would walk into a creative writing workshop, place a rock on the table and say: “Write a poem about this. When I’m back, we’ll share the results.” He’d then go across the street to a bar and enjoy a drink. For a while, I employed this same somatic ritual, using objects around my house. I drafted this poem quickly, beginning to end, in a few minutes. When I showed it to a friend, they said it was about fatherhood. I revised it with the belief they were right. - Dobby Gibson
Dobby Gibson is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little Glass Planet (Graywolf Press, 2019). He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Nine) Dobby Gibson
“Poem for An Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” is an ode, a poem of praise for an object with implications beyond itself. It begins intimately, “Little glass planet, / I like picking you up.” Isn’t the pleasure of holding a small object a sine qua non for collecting? The image move outwards from the speaker’s “own thought” to the craftsman’s creating breath perhaps still contained in the “beautiful bauble.” But this is no fancy objet d’art, but a tool “with a job to do” that has earned its praise through the hardship of “early mornings” and “storm warnings.” The speaker freely admits not remembering where he found it—“what shore / you washed up on.” We travel with object and owner in the digressive company of sleeping pilots, the long blur of the journey. In a rhetorical twist, the speaker doesn’t ask the bobber how it feels about being dry docked “far / from the sea,” but returns to the object’s tactile presence, its “thisness,” in a lover’s discourse:
I love how perfectly you fit in my hand,
at first cold, and the way the morning looks
through you, as green and cloudy
as an unknown we no longer fear.
This description becomes phenomenal, moving from physical presence—nailed by “at first cold”—to astronomy and epistemology. It makes the bobber a cosmic object, but homelike—with the mystery that home always entails: “an unknown we no longer fear.”
The next lines resemble in tone the bluff friendliness of Frank O’Hara in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun At Fire Island” ‘. . . Sorry, Sun, I stayed up late last night talking to Hal’--—no preamble necessary, just casual fellow feeling:
But I wouldn’t want to be held up
to the sun either, not because I’m a monster,
but because I, too, am transparent and trusting,
and mistake both for the truth.
Like O’Hara, our speaker is vulnerable—but where O’Hara finds himself implicated in the sun’s transience (“. . . go I must, they’re calling / me,” the sun says)—the speaker here is vulnerable because “transparent and trusting.” He asserts a psychological affinity with the bobber, both mistaking transparency and trust for truth.
The speaker goes on to assert an broader affinity for the bobber and its situation, making of it a microcosm for the workings of human community: “a nearly invisible line connecting us to the fleet. . . .” After all, we too are creatures made of breath, some of it from “an old sea”—we go back that far. The poem’s final leap, made possible by the object but reaching beyond it, attains the heart of human need:
. . .the ancient word hidden in our lungs
that once released back into the wild
will finally set us free.
Dobby Gibson’s entrancing “For an Antique Korean Fishing Bobber” renders us dazed and lucky travelers, fetched up at a wonder that is ours—not just to hold—but to embody: essential as the line, “nearly invisible,” that connects human ingenuity and survival, spirit and flesh.—Angela Ball
Comments