GTIMOTHY GORDAN

★ ★ ★ ★

POETRY

Image by James Owen

Empty Heaven, Empty Earth

Rarely, if ever, you rise from darkness
into light, wonder, joy, love and family
follow, mostly, if you’re lucky, and even
if not, at least you know you’re awake,
maybe for the first time, and on one
or another dreamy, sumptuous spring
or summer night, alone with your muse,
imagining laying-up your stores in heaven,
moonlight flooding water, lotus mirroring
sky, white plum blossom, seemingly spiced air,
you return to this earth, equally empty,
with what you’ve got, sea, sky, air.

Pale Fires I
August – September 2020

The fires are out, mostly, in the streets,
just heat laying-on, thick and muscly
under ubiquitous blue moon, over outback,
too, where no beautiful thing shines
in moony presence as before, and yet,
if desert could sense summer, then, like us,
of magic and memory, no angst and fire,
human heat, would roughage, sand and stone,
viper, creeper, corbie circling its dregs
for steaming dead flesh, wish, as we do now,
frost ice the blossom, winter shelter-in-place,
ground-zero cold-white glow become us?

Pale Fires II
Fall 2020

The geese have come back,
one last drink at the Bosque,

flight north, cold coming with them
on the wing, carried in their bones,

heat, banked-out fires, earth-ash and dead,
memory imbued in the marrow.