Cloud of Unknowing
(upon Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows,1890)
… look upon yourself as an exile and a pilgrim on this earth. – Thomas à Kempis
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, unseemly pulse of the spheres, field shot through
with life and light and fear and darker ends days away.
Midnight-Blue-Breathless-
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 deadend, tough stucco quonset huts,
here-and-there shadows scuffling past barred jalousies, masked/not,
vaxxed/not, both feet out all this into that kamikaze blowing us
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-
GTimothy Gordon divides lives between Eurasia and the deep shadows of the Desert Southwest Organ Mountains. Dream Wind was published in 2020 (Spirit-of-the-Ram Press), while Everything Speaking Chinese received the Riverstone Press (AZ) Poetry Prize. Work has appeared in AGNI, American Literary Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Louisville Review, Mississippi Review, New York Quarterly, Phoebe, RHINO, Sonora Review, Texas Observer, among others. Recognitions include NEA & NEH Fellowships & three Pushcart nominations. EMPTY HEAVEN/EMPTY EARTH will be published this year.