OPEN HOUSE (fictions) and an expanded edition of  the prize-winning SunStone Poetry Press chapbook, EVERYTHING SPEAKING CHINESE:  ENHANCED,  REVISED EDITION, were published in 2015, while GROUND OF THIS BLUE EARTH and UNDER ARIES were published in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Gordon's awards include National Endowment for the Arts & Humanities Fellowships and writing residencies, while several poems have been nominated for Pushcarts. NIGHT COMPANY was nominated for an NEA Western States' Book Awards. 

He divides personal and professional lives among Asia, Europe, and the Mountain/Desert Southwest.  

          What is Light After All but Desire?

Better to illuminate than merely to shine . . .
-Aquinas-


Beyond the complex, a parti-colored suite of prayer-flag kerchiefs hitched on hemp
And cord stretched across the patch of thin-skinned, filéd, silver poplars adorning Night, 
People, Pueblo, Llano decked out in desert ecru, ochre, divining light.  And then they ignite 
So soon as spiritlamps, spots of unknowable light rarely seen, or first-felt in the blood, 
Until late, blue, then red and violet sparking inside and out chambered houses of the poor 
Like winter-white luminaria, now midsummer-mad, adobe, stucco, terrones marsh-brick 
Glowing, while the flat pale sky requites its dark desire over clumps of mountains splayed in 
Silhouette, white night caught in the desertspell of wild iris, jasmine and lilac, Chaste berry shrub, 
Sexpot Tease Cereus, her solitary solstice taking nightwhite root, blooming oh so virginal! 
For once, and once only, out of cactus in fragrant darkness, then poof— gone with the dawn, 
Light after all but desire inspiriting dreamy clay.


                      Spring-Moon

Lotuses on a Summer’s Evening
(after Yung Shou-p’ing)

What if they’re not as sublime as baroque Blue Nile lotus,
Crème-white Madonna lily, ascending aflash from sacred waters, 
Stems stiff as righteous Jamaican spliffs, têtes regally coiffured, 
But just gangly and beige and somewhat scumbled, brushed on 
Mulberry bark or rice paper, their taupe, misty palette Home, 
Opening nightly up from rushes and shallows for no one but 
Themselves, Art, Nature, Poetry, and the unseen Spring-Moon 
Illuminating mist just enough for feel, just as it illumines every
Mortal thing in this world, however briefly, fabled glam aesthetes 
Sporting toque-blanche-et-azure crowns, milkweed and toadstool—, 
Sunflowers caught furiously yellow on canvas in the act of being  
Nothing more beautiful than they already were, are, always have been, 
In bleak, wintry Arles.

OPEN HOUSE (fictions) and an expanded edition of  the prize-winning SunStone Poetry Press chapbook, EVERYTHING SPEAKING CHINESE:  ENHANCED,  REVISED EDITION, were published in 2015, while GROUND OF THIS BLUE EARTH and UNDER ARIES were published in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Gordon's awards include National Endowment for the Arts & Humanities Fellowships and writing residencies, while several poems have been nominated for Pushcarts. NIGHT COMPANY was nominated for an NEA Western States' Book Awards. He divides personal and professional lives among Asia, Europe, and the Mountain/Desert Southwest.  

BEFORE THE FALL by GTimothy Gordon

Picasso lived this painting of tears, blue
as the humid depths of the abyss, and full of pity.
                                                                                                                    
-Apollinaire-

His child’s hands
Keep curling, merging
Moment and myth, husband, 
Esposa, bowed, barefoot, 
Shy-eyes beggaring nothing
(Nothing like the maimed
At Guernica, blind men,
Sad acrobats, tumblers, 
Breasts nailed to nudes, 
Guitars the shapes of women, 
Tontos y locos), crude blues,
Blueboy savior blessing all
Before the tide of washed blue sea,
Before duende struck,
Before the scripture, “Pablo Picasso,”
Título, LA TRAGEDIA, 
Lugar, Barcelona, España,
​That summer surréaliste, 1903.

​BAS-RELIEF BLUE by GTimothy Gordon


Behold the sun as still
As the flat, blue, pastel sky,
And the day daily burns a slow,
Fervent burn in its bas-relief beneath--
Brute lives of strays and waifs,
Unnamed, unnamable, 
Found on the floor of earth,
True as the trueblue sky,
Still as the stillborn sun.

​DISORDER AND EARLY SPRING by GTimothy Gordon
 

They have finally   
Decided to come

Alive on the lower
Slope, shape and color

Intruding into view
Mountain and brush,

First faint stippled hues 
Effacing the comely blue   

And prescient sun
Even unto the nightswell

Where in-deep,
Under starlit canopy

They cease waiting,
Sensing their certain sway   

Into the wild,                         
Crazy with color.