On Basil

BASIL

There in Fiesole it was always fresh

In the laneway where the spry grandfather

Tipped you his smile in the earliest wash

Of sunlight, piling strawberries high and higher

In a fragile pyramid of edible air.

Light down the years, the same sun rinses your dark

Hair over and over with brightness where

You kneel to stir the earth among thyme and chard,

Rosemary and the gathering of mints,

The rough leaf picked for tea this summer noon,

The smooth one saved for pesto in the winter,

For the cold will come, though you turn to me soon,

Your eyes going serious green from hazel,

Your quick hand on my face the scent of basil.

----- Gibbons Ruark

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1941, Gibbons Ruark grew up in Methodist parsonages in various towns in the eastern part of the state. Educated in North Carolina public schools and at the Universities of North Carolina and Massachusetts, he has published his poems widely for over forty years in magazines like The New Republic, Poetry, The New Yorker and Ploughshares. His work has won him numerous awards, including three NEA Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize and the 1984 Saxifrage Prize for Keeping Company. His poem "John Clare's Finches," first published in The New Republic, appears in The Best American Poetry 2009. Among his eight collections, the most recent are Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1999) and Staying Blue (Lost Hills Books, 2008). After forty years of teaching, he has retired to his birthplace of Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Kay.