two poems by g. timothy gordon

Clouds of Unknowing

(upon Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, 1890)

I can still see them all bent with the wheat                      
and wind, thick-dark heaven, full ripe tall & tawny    
deep summer shocks, unshorn ears, rough swathes 
of journey’s end road, green, brown patches slicing 
what’s half-seen, what’s not, all-of-a-heap palette 
more full-fall Parisian than mad Arles July light, 
birds of blackness, blackbirds, ravens, citron-straw wheat, 
wind, unruly pulse of the spheres, field shot through 
with life and light and fear and darker ends days away.

Midnight-Blue-Breathless-

"...That forever the geography
         which leans in
         on me I compel
         backwards...
              Polis
       is this"

Charles Olson

These, like all others, serious days, like us losing touch, 
place in the week, lacking all sense, lost each-to-each,
no mo’ boffo mojo, kaput cachet, snappy, snazzy, jazzy 
fast-talking-scat tophat screen screwballs, slinky qipao satins, 
etched antique pillow ticking, late capital, back-at-it Mondays, 
off-the-grid lost weekends à boîtes, bal musettes, before sunset, 
pastureland, churning moonlit desert city ups-and-downs, 
mesa switchbacks, hotfooting-it among devilthorn, prickly cholla, 
hedgehog & barrel cacti, ingathering caretaker highbeam bearings 
onto Corte Dios, Grace Village dead end, tough stucco quonset huts, 
here-and-there shadows scuffling past barred jalousies, masked/not, 
vaxxed/not, both feet out all this into that kamikaze blur blowing us 
lickety-split back into god-knows-what, not sound, sight, tongue, touch, 
thought, no primped legacy, long goodbye, final paternal rites, feeling all 
but midnight-blue-breathless-

G. TIMOTHY GORDON’s Dream Wind was published in 2020 (Spirit-of-the-Ram P). His Everything Speaking Chinese received the Riverstone (AZ) Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in AGNI, American Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, Kansas Quarterly, Louisville Review, Mississippi Review, New York Quarterly, Phoebe, RHINO, Sonora Review, and the Texas Observer, among others. His Emptyheaven/Emptyearth will be published in 2022.