GTIMOTHY GORDON - POEMS

Gordon’s DREAM WIND was published 2020 (Spirit-of-the-Ram P), while EVERYTHING SPEAKING CHINESE received RIVERSTONE P (AZ) Poetry Prize. Work appears in AGNI, American Literary R, Cincinnati PR, Kansas Q, Louisville R, Mississippi R, New York Q, Phoebe, RHINO, Sonora R, Texas Observer, among others. Recognitions include NEA & NEH Fellowships, residencies, and three Pushcart nominations. EMPTY HEAVEN, EMPTY EARTH is now under publication review. He divides professional and personal lives among Asia, the Desert Southwest, and Maine. (77)

​Becoming Us
We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty.
-Jack Gilbert-

​Storms raging elsewhere out there,
country, culture, old order unhinged,
pitch-black fires not lit by dead-summer   
Sonoran heat, dawn-stoked 110°, &
climbing, like blunt June blue moon, 
& while we hunker-down for years,
it seems, One World Together at Home,
yearning for human heat & grand passion,
full flowering life we thought we knew,
we’re willing to settle, fast-track color
and fall-into-bitter-winter, countless,
moonless nights swiping the iPhone,
bingeing the tube, home fires blazing,
d.o.a..
 
 

Pale Fires I
Summer 2020
​

The geese have come back,
one last drink at the Bosque,                                                                                                         
 
flight north, cold already with them
on the wing, carried in their bones,
 
heat, banked-out fires, earth-ash and dead,
memory imbued in the marrow.

Home
​

​We’re sensing it might never leave 
from where it came, threading through
 
The Organs’ Needle, Baylor Canyon Pass,
by air, luxe steamer, quiet footfall border
 
breach, disturbing the peace, filling home,
us, scrubbed with dread, who know no
 
this- or-off-world fix making life livable
as before. By dawn & moon lamplight,
 
we dream of home, how it is, was,
never be home again.

​Bro’ Moment

​ 
Outlier nesters filling up- and -out spring greens,   
chitalpa, spruce, willow curated street transplants,   
white-wing petite doves, thrashers, whiptails,
each flat as a paten, tiny, tight clutch, solo-living
in deep time, sheathed-in-place, tasked by instinct
to be watchful, patient, in fierce, daylong desert heat, 
never once stirring, embracing, this throbbing air.          

​Full Moon, With Stars

​The full moon rises, pauses,
takes its place among all              
midsummer stars not known
for color, shape, size,
overwrought pride,
full moon, with stars,
the kind of night thing,
above all, we wish ever
with us, in a dark time,
never not be new.