Gowpen & Undertow
Gowpen
Distaff in the doorway, Aurora,
procurer of metallic hyperboles –
raw and weeping rachis without tears,
what is your reason for lingering?
I’ve read your private manuscripts –
your bright body of moss and longing –
at first light your window’s leaves quietly
turn their mouths to buttery, swollen lanterns.
I’ve seen your stilted talk, your slicing
clavicle leaning through every threshold
with bruising anxiety: “This isn’t a good look,”
looking at me. Break glass in case of emergency.
Compelled to your blue landing, sky-grey
snow swims in your gowpen. My hands,
a begging bowl amid unframed lines
perpetually at risk, let us find mesmerizing
spaces, our own geometry among public
wires, thick buses, billboards, dorsa, replicas
of longing akin to the contour of beryl words,
unauthorized sounds caroming into doorsills.
Now that I am at your doorstep with Lorca’s
verde gifted and disguised as naïve Tillandsia –
I can only foretaste your reply, wind or blister
in each hand, precariously awaiting your reply.
Undertow
“Significance is inherent in the human body.”
– Julia Kristeva
was sleep
discovered
in offshore
ruins
where you were
always implied
in telescopic currents
fusing archetypal
tankers
to internal waves
here –
adrift
from quotidian
sargassum
recusant qualia
swimming
in sapphire skin
– to you
always to you –
this stir
from where
my body may never
return
Elizabeth S. Gunn (www.elizabethsgunn.com) serves as the Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Business at Nevada State University. She writes poetry and fiction in Henderson, Nevada, where she lives with her wife and their three rescue pups in the endless Mojave Desert.
