“Your Clothes in Tatters,” “Into the Slow Air,” and “Current or Currently”

“Your Clothes in Tatters,” “Into the Slow Air,” and “Current or Currently”

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Your Clothes in Tatters

I.

...skyward, lying on our backs listening for rainfall,

lying, we the ones of loitering, of settling into the longing for dreams to overtake us,

asking if anything could overtake us,

this overwhelming desire, this yearning for...

wind through leaves,

river’s gentle susurrus,

sound of wood knock on water

...grey morning we thought

we had done away with,

grey morning we thought

we’d awoken from, thought we’d overtook,

grey morning as any morning known

before, we having dwelt here before,

having been...

who says that words aren’t accurate,

who says we cannot know,

as in the mind

and its accuracy, its perception,

as in the nouns

and their reflections,

only in this reality and its becoming

...sky grey above the dark grey waters,

river meeting grey horizon,

meeting leaves folded into

compacted grey gravel, we folded into

one another awaiting some unfolding, some development,

awaiting something other than what we have,

something other than

where we’ve been, what we’ve known...

II.

wet leaves turning to black

against gutter

fey light evening out

branch against cement

your language moving across

as if we’ve had some choice

in the asking where have you been

if to speak is to speak the truth

this the rain falling that hadn’t fallen

this the same world

                   

Into the Slow Air

you’ve looked away

as a barbarian stranger looking,

your voice clotting in words

other than english,

full of departures,

barbed half-light across

your face taken up by sleep,

your words knotting

like weedy grass.

blackened sticks lie in fireplace.

this language wrenching already,

this light seemingly apart

from mine in the open globe

of dawn verging on pale roseate.

it's snowing again

and I can’t get around it,

the molecule of its own cloth

cresting again and drawing out.

the coffee drips

and the snow comes.

you’re looking out at me

and there’s a feeling in it, of it.

Current or Currently

we stood outside, beneath an oil white residence

as it began to rain.

we could hear the echoes of boys playing

in the almond eyed shade

like a tracing of tempo, back and forth,

willingly spoken to dry eyes.

this killing is an open gate,

it is but a riddle,

is but a book about hope

in memory’s negative.

we might have talked but we found

it unattended, a personless

city made only of wood and words

and stone, and there’s

an ash in the air at night now, among the rows

and rows of almond trees.

I kept thinking, as I listened to the careful

clicking of your tongue

on your teeth, that your hair is not brown,

so much as it might be

a purified bursting, a system crashing,

a forging of the purely spacial

into a structure so much like a world.

About the Author

Samuel Gilpin

Samuel Gilpin is a poet living in Portland, OR, who holds a Ph.D. in English Lit. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which explains why he works as a door to door salesman. A Prism Review Poetry Contest winner, he has served as the Poetry Editor of Witness Magazine and Book Review Editor of Interim. A Cleveland State University First Book Award finalist, his work has appeared in various journals and magazines, most recently in The Bombay Gin, Omniverse, and Colorado Review. His chapbook, Self-Portraits as a Reddening Sky, will be out soon from Cathexis Press.