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Mark Gibbons
Rainbow Escalator
 for Jerry McDonnell
Manokotak graveyard,
a cluster of white crosses,
swords, planted like trellises for weeds.
Bright plastic K-Mart flowers, bought
on shopping trips to Anchorage,
adorn the markers of the nameless
remembered. Temporary
evidence of the Alaskan crusade.
Framed by rain clouds above;
below, a muddy, dead-end road.
In the center of the photograph,
beyond the cemetery,
a burning rainbow streams out of the ground,
arches into a thunderhead,
a good distance across the plain, now brown
as elders who still talk to blue mountains
and fly in their snow machines.
Their fathers knew water was holy
before the whispering black robes came.
These Old Skins believe rainbows,
like the escalator at Sears,
transport the people underground
into the sky. Where looking west
they can see past the Bering Sea, and looking east
they watch the father beaming
behind the boy behind the camera's
clicking shutter. Caught as color
in a tunnel of light, a vision
of Christ they can understand.
Also by Mark Gibbons Nothing Right or Left -->
Mark Gibbons lives in Missoula, Montana with his wife and two sons where he's a poet in the schools with the Missoula Writing Collaborative. He drives truck and moves furniture to pay rent. His poems have appeared in CutBank, Talking River Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Comstock Review and Rattle. His second chapbook, Circling Home, due out this summer, won the Scattered Cairns Press chapbook contest. His first collection of poems was entitled Something Inside Us, 1995.
Mark can be reached by email at markgibbons@gumballpoetry.com
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