POETRY

The Etymology of Gazebo

By Matt Donovan     VOLUME 53.3, winner of the 2020 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize judged by Paisley Rekdal

Vertical Divider

                                                                                  Tamir Rice (2002–2014)

will always have a hole in it

that hauls our guesswork
year after year. Most claim

it appeared without warning—
taking the ending of a future

tense for gaze & colliding it

with a verb shaped by a pronoun
which gives rise to I shall see

or perhaps I will look,
both phrases suggesting

a promise still to come—yet
the idea contains a void

you have to pretend isn’t there.
Break open the roots & you’ll need

to choose whether to believe
in a prefix that hints at

the way we see & an ending
that offers the image of a gazebo

being pulled apart piece by piece

as it’s packed up & moved to a city
where it’ll be built all over again.

People are tending to it with care,
shoveling dirt, carrying lengths

of metal & wood, scraping
shingles from the roof,

disassembling everything

down to the ribbons knotting
the beams, down to the cement

picnic table strapped to a chain
& hovering a few feet above

the ground while a vehicle
somewhere loudly proclaims

it’s moving backwards
again. Back up here

just a bit & you may want to ask
if it’s safe to assume whenever

we sit beneath a structure
open on all sides that provides

shelter from the sun & rain, our hope
is to look, to see. We might not have

any interest in seeing what’s right
in front of us, much like the man who,

before he strolled off & called the police,
sat in the gazebo just a few feet away,

silently watching but not seeing

a twelve-year-old kid holding
a toy gun. Is there space here

for another theory? Some believe
we inherited the word through

words no one now speaks that mean
honor & heed, although those roots,

looking at them now, seem
like clusters of letters saying

nothing at all. Our words continue

to fail & yet here I sit, peering into
the name for some meager thing,

unable to stop pulling it apart,

as if that offered a kind of prayer
& not, as it sometimes seems,

much more than a means
to avert my gaze

from another child dead too soon.

After the gazebo was moved--
so that it would not be destroyed,

so that there might still be a place
to reflect & remember

& this death might not be

so easy to forget—the man who preserved it
wanted to remind us that words

like memorial & honor so often slip
through our hands like water, water

that becomes a trampled stretch of snow

which lingers in a park through
the end of November wherever

the gazebo’s shadow falls.

Online, you can see Tamir Rice
on the security camera, moments

before he’s shot, scoop a bit of snow

from the grass & shape it into a ball
with one hand before walking a few steps

& tossing it with a little arc
onto the sidewalk where it stays

a little while more.

 


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MATT DONOVAN is the author of two collections of poetry--Vellum (Mariner 2007) and Rapture & the Big Bam (Tupelo Press 2017) as well as a book of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, the Believer, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Seneca Review, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. He serves as the director of the Poetry Center at Smith College.


VOLUME 53.3