Story of Robert Gibbons

Robert Gibbons

Robert Gibbons received his MFA in Creative Writing in 2018 from City College in New York. He is the recipient of many awards and publishing credits. His first collection, Close to the Tree, was published in 2012 by Three Rooms Press.

Oh, the ocean

I heard the story. The man named John wanted to proselytize on a restricted island located off the coast of the Indian Ocean. And the people were called the Sentinelese a 55,000 year old civilization that refuse to conform. They were not willing to modernize.

Not willing to gentrify into a world that is as fast and as long as it will last.

The people, the Sentinelese, considered tribal or primitive or any of those textbook phrases are not inhibited, are not limited to our idea of society and what is wrong with keeping your person close, they will not be coerced, to innovate, not the will of the peopleto invite a resort , a casino, a development, a cohort of island with miniature golf cars to live beneath the radar, without car or airplane, without chaos or the insane, not the paved  roads of our conquerors, not the blasphemous loads of steel or machinery, the Sentinelese, their animistic bodies  are marvels for the curious, for the purity of Christendom, an art object for the museum cabinet, maybe a display for the zoo  a crew of elephants domesticated appropriate without social, or economic, or political, non- status seekers, cultural phonics and his name was John, he rented a boat to traverse the mighty waters,  the restricted area of our histories, the Nicobar, the Andaman, the Indian, all the names we call, and tried to pay them, tried to pray for them, tried to anoint them into the New World, in the Old world would travel by canoe with Bible in hand, a man of land of country, of privilege, of  means in between this heaven we call hell,  this Dante’s purgatory, his Christian-missionary self came to tell them about Jesus, about the crucifix, as if Columbus is not in  our thought bought and sold small pox, as if the Santa Maria, Nina, and the Pinta, did not arrive the Amerigo Vespucci in him, with all the self- regard for his nation, John-the-Conqueror John-on-the-Cross met them, the Sentinelese, a people, a warrior, a sect, a tribe, an animist, a blame, for the loot, for the booty, for the conspiracy, for the piracy, to tell them about God far from their island, a  God that is a star, in this myriad planet, in this pantheon of poly-god, and polytheism, a mob of them with bow and arrow, call him Roque, or her

Crow- mother, call them devastation or destruction, John-the Conqueror, his Bible Shot him back to the ocean, back to the baptism of Pochantas, shot him back to the  Crucified, like Calvary, a blood bath as communion, a blood bath as indigenous, a dragging a hanging, an insurrection beyond border, beyond state of the union, a mutiny like Amistad his body a breach, a reach beyond latitude, beyond ship wreck, the tetonic plates will implode and the land will return Pangea. Will Gawanda, will glaciate, will ice over in the kingdom come will rain murder, and trial and tribulation, will be 40 days of Noah on the rainy tide, when the ocean becomes land and the land become ocean, Oh ocean, drown me Oh ocean, flood your gates, make me mud lotus, great fertilizer, great murderer, my body will be like his a decomposition, great murderer, unction me to the great

Beyond, transpose me into plankton, into amoeba, into keel, and then John saw and number that no man could number, his body the great revelator, Oh, the Ocean is mother ocean her porous landscape, the ways she mates life and death.

The way breath suffocates, and the consulate wants his body back, but he is taken he is flight and elegy, when our body is baptized in Jesus’s name, Oh ocean, submerged in your liquid grave, the waves are contentious, the moon and tide roar back to God, Oh, ocean is the photosynthesis to mention when my body becomes ecosystem or am I a  philistine as caverns of the body becomes sunshine, part pine needle, stymied energy, pent up in me, oh, ocean, the part of me to be pure, water, pure whisper,  and sound, Rumi’s water wheel, my trajectory protected landscape. I can be so shallow as I follow hegemony. Ocean, feel the motion as I caracole your water, may I farrago, may I embargo in you. Oh, sacred space, O, Ocean, O, Soul, mold me of the amphibious and indigenous humbled by you. O, Ocean, O, Soul, still in search of the old gold, will take back my nativism in your caverns of blue and infinite where we live only as tenement on earth, O, Ocean, only death, only death.