‘CURRENT OR CURRENTLY’ & ‘INTO THE SLOW AIR’

Aaron Beck

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.

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.

its 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.

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.