Claude
'Trees of The Gibbon' frames a single after-practice moment in Western Pennsylvania: the team scrimmaging for 'St. Bernard's Grammar School' with 'The Gibbon at quarterback', then boarding 'a school bus' while the Gibbon instead walks home 'Along down along the popular trees / with the team football in his hand'. The poem holds on the landscape - 'misty and dark green is the follage', the long grass, the 'late afternoom / orange / yellow Western Pennsylvania fall' whose streaks 'blaze / like good black coal beneath and above / the sunset' - so that the boy's solitary walk dissolves into the autumn light around him.
As the opening of 'The Gibbons Draft', this short poem functions as an establishing shot: it does not dramatize the Gibbon so much as place him, a quarterback who carries the team's ball away from the team, walking the tree-lined road while the others ride. The choice of solitude is given without comment, which lets it read as character rather than incident. The poem's real work is its light: the closing simile 'streaks blaze / like good black coal beneath and above / the sunset' is rooted in coal country, turning the Pennsylvania fall into something industrial and luminous at once, fire and fuel folded together. Smith's spellings ('popular' for poplar, 'scrimaging', 'follage', 'afternoom') are kept as written and give the draft its handmade texture. The singular 'Gibbon' here against the collection's plural 'Gibbons' suggests the figure is still being formed - one boy among the poplars who will become the draft's recurring subject - so the piece reads as both a scene and an origin.