Claude
'Trees of The Gibbon' sets a single after-practice moment in Western Pennsylvania: players 'scrimaging / for St. Bernard's Grammar School' with 'The Gibbon at quarterback', then 'the team / getting on a school bus' while 'The Gibbon walking home' goes 'Along down along the popular trees / with the team football in his hand'. The poem then settles on the landscape, 'misty and dark green is the follage', the long grass and 'the late afternoon', where 'orange' stands alone in the margin before the 'yellow Western Pennsylvania fall' whose 'streaks blaze / like good black coal beneath and above / the sunset'.
As the opening of the draft, the poem works as an establishing shot: it places the Gibbon rather than dramatizing him, a quarterback who carries the team's ball away from the team while the others ride. The solitude is given without comment, so it reads as character rather than incident. The closing simile roots the autumn light in coal country, joining fire and fuel. The source spellings 'popular', 'scrimaging' and 'follage' are kept as written; the last word of the afternoon line is a ghost-legged n on the typescript, not an m.