A Poem from Tim Gordon

Nature

La nature devrait tout dire ou rien . . .
                        -- Pascal, Pensees #72

Beyond the Latilla fence nothing to harvest
but gritty sand, bunchgrass, all prickly flora,
real failures to launch verdantly or in frippery,
as is their wont, until you breach the imaged coppice,
wild plum and crab-apple, mulberry maidenheads
taken by insatiable chatterbox silkworms, a veritable
veldt of desert beneath the widow's-peak shadow
mountain brow where fall almost ends, winter blossom
begins, back-channeling its Endless Summer trope,
color amok yet on front- and- up-range slopes, on the undreamt
an unloved, humpback butte and mesa, seamless plateau,--
gully, gulch, arroyo, ravine, dumb dry wash until every
evening prairie star torched just for them in the falling blue
half-life before the first blanched clutch of ice and frost
radiates everything and nothing with quicksilver white light.

Tim Gordon's Dreamwind chapbook was accepted by Finishing Line Press (April 2018), its full-length complement is concurrently under publisher review elsewhere, his seventh book, From Falling, was published by Spirit-of-the-Ram Press (Autumn 2017).  His work appears in journals like Agni, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Louisville Review, Mississippi Review, New York Quarterly, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Rhino, Sonora Review, Texas Observer, Texas Literary Review, and Baseball Bard, among others.  Everything Speaking Chinese was awarded the SunStone Press Poetry Prize (AZ).  Some recognitions include NEA &  NEH Fellowships and nominations for four Pushcart Prizes and The NEA Western States' Book Awards.  He divides professional and personal lives among Asia, the Desert/Mountain Southwest and coastal Maine.