… something beyond themselves, beyond words.
-Celan-
There’s a scent that can’t be defined
like breathless painting, music, dance
unplowed yet into sentient fields,
graphic grey-mists hovering water,
that won’t be read or turned to tongue
but be lived in its own skin as attar
from nard or musk, commingled
jungle flora, balm from incense forests
or fetid, pressed-against-the-pavement
hog-nosed weasels littering freeway ditches,
splatters and drips reeking formidable life
without intrusive name, logic, their rank
ineffable, what we can’t arrest as our own
smart and sensible and very own keepsake.
GTimothy Gordon: Dream Wind was published December 2019 (Spirit-of-the-Ram Press). Work appears in Agni, American Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, Kansas Quarterly, Louisville Review, Mississippi Review, New York Quarterly, Phoebe, Rhino, Sonora Review, and Texas Observer, among others. Everything Speaking Chinese received the Riverstone Press Poetry Prize.
