Coasting
STEPHEN GIBSON is a poet. In 1996 he co-founded the arts magazine Mobile City, which has since been featured in the Washington Post, USA Today, and on NPR’s Morning Edition. Stephen’s poems have been published in literary journals such as Ploughshares, the Boston Review, and Gargoyle. He has read at a wide variety of venues including the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, Sarah Lawrence College, the New York Public Library’s Writers at noon reading series, and the Blabbermouth Reading Series, which he coordinated from 1994–2004.
COASTING
Tonight, riding home, I keep looking up at the distant radio towers,
and watching the red lights flash on and off over the city and the hills.
As I ride, the Summer night is just beginning around me. And I like
it, this overlapping hour between coming home and going out, the
hour of cars circling the blocks in search of parking, of laughter from
rooftop restaurants, and music that echoes into the street from open
bar room doors. Downtown, people are still walking to their subway
stops, while behind them the internally lit office buildings are becoming
palaces- block after block of burning light simmering toward a brown-
out. I ride hard through traffic, noticing turn signals, smelling the pollen
in the air, and wondering to myself what is important in this world?
At this moment someone I know might be lifting money from their
wallet at a crowded happy hour, or staring at closed storefronts filled
with fashion magazines and other attention getting devices. I am seek-
ing to find the meaning below the static of the merchandise. Then, at
the top of the rise, I stop pedaling and let myself coast down the last
avenue. Overhead, the sequences click on. Click off. I can see the sunset
like a forest fire slow-walking across the suburbs beyond the river, head-
ing west. “Touch me now in this fading light…” might be words to a
song I would like to hear right now, or they might be words I want
to say to you when we are lying together in the darkness, and the night
is cool across the city once again. Click on, and I am coming. Click off,
I’m almost there.
-Stephen Gibson 2001
Published: June 2nd, 2011