From Ritual   A slow parade of old west enthusiasts, camp song and hymn, came in along the winding   way where rural declined to suburban, slow riders and wagoners passing a cow staked   to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly up--not in vacant lots the ancient icons   of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics, in sacrifices and customs of bride-price   or dowry.  (It's good people no longer make blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,   for example, and in the crunching gravel parking lots of small churches--oh but we do.)    In his tenth book of poems, Reginald Gibbons immerses the reader in many different places and moments of intensity, including a lake in the Canadian north, a neighborhood in Chicago, the poet Osip Mandelshtam's midnight of social cataclysm and imagination, a horse caravan in Texas, and an archeological dig on the steppes near the Volga River. Last Lake begins with a cougar and ends with bees; it speaks in two ways--with reminiscence, meditation, and memorial, and with springing leaps of image and thought.