those who are able to graze the sky,
he believes, must be gods
BY GUSTAV PARKER HIBBETT
quique æthera carpere possent
crēdidit esse deōs
—Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.219-220
I’ve always wanted to build
a house of cards, but I don’t
have the steady hands for it.
The way a man on tightrope
swallows all the open space
between two cliffs; this sense
of turning self to spectacle
on one’s own terms. I came close
to this a couple times, at the end
of high jump competitions when
I found myself the only one left
standing. My name came bubbling
through the stadium speakers,
and for a moment all the track
meet goers’ eyes converged
on me. Alone, already having
won, I could ask the judge
to set the bar wherever, where
I got a final three attempts.
The tradition was to go
for greatness at a height
I’d never cleared, enlist
the whole track in a brush
with godliness. I don’t think
I ever cleared a height this way,
with the echo of accelerating
claps marking each step,
the quiet that bloomed to fill
the stadium in the moment
after I took off, but I remember
always feeling triumphant,
precious, as my contorted
body fell back down, having
reached for sunlight,
even if I failed to hold it.
After Practice, a Black Boy Goes Supernova
BY GUSTAV PARKER HIBBETT
for Noah
Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility…
—Saidiya Harman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
It’s evening, and the grass is gathering
cold. We are the last two on the track,
silhouetted underneath the football field
uprights, not ready for the heat to leave us.
The high jump mat is webbed in shadows
growing deeper every moment—soon
the light will be too thin for trying; soon
we’ll stow the bar and standards, replace
the cover on the mat, unlace our spikes,
and slip into our nighttime trivialities,
disappear into the dulling of an institution
that will mistake us for each other,
but for now we set the bar above the heights
we understand, allow ourselves each one last
attempt. The germinating dark is silent
but for crickets; we are each other’s only
witnesses. We understand like no one else does
how it feels to be a body hanging, burning
in the space between. Interchangeable,
disposable. We know that when they see us
they see both, or neither. At meets, they call us
the high jump brothers, ask us if we’re maybe twins
or cousins. Tonight, I jump first. A few
false starts, and then I’m off, elastic-smooth,
determined, wondering what it’d be like
to clear this height with no one here to know
but us. To claim it: yes, I’ve cleared six eight.
But I miss—unmoor it with my shoulder,
though as we set it up again Noah assures me
I was over it. Just a matter of alignment,
of fine-tuning. Now he takes his mark.
Pauses for a moment, then starts bounding,
slowly curving, making tighter, smaller steps,
keeping something headlong, something
starter pistol in his stride, then up.
A sail full with sudden wind. An exhale
of an upward motion. Turning as he rises,
blooms. His head clears, then his torso, then
his calves. He clips it with his heels, his kick
a millisecond slow, but it’s clear this height belongs
to him. Given time, given another run, another
jump like that. His. His body and the bar start falling,
then they stop midair. Something in the fabric
of the evening splits open. Time implodes,
and at its center, Noah, in the air above the mat,
going supernova; full of everything he ever wanted,
everything he didn’t: protostars and space clouds,
black holes and pulsar winds. Laws of man
undone, rewritten around cotton candy swirls
of gravity and color. Black boy as anything,
as the music of an inner world inside out.
I see galaxies erupting, life reforming.
Planets where the word for dark means sacred.
Worlds where we move like we move
in the air, unbound. Then he lands, and things
compose themselves again. Stars unborn.
Shockwaves in reverse, until the world
is how it was, though we felt it change.
We saw it rearrange itself.
We saw the world rearrange itself for us.
