the pages of an open book like some repetitive
chant that i want to remember permanently,
as a vital sense of pause i can use to decorate
time, and must i fear formlessness or those urgent
motions in the senses, and i am sad in all this learning
or becoming or in asking how as the deafening
uninterrupted volume in asking to choose, to think,
to mean, to gather, to add gravitas to those inmost
parts that shift through frail silence as i press out
voice at the borders of everything, and this just
seems a shimmer of gnats at noon or the quite
indifferent unstoppable reverie of a morning
blackbird, and this just seems to mean that i am
held together, to be accurate, to be objective,
i am held as a rough clay bottle, as a damp
deep fog, and that was a real lie, because i am
afraid of being misunderstood for i have loved
nothing brutally, muscular and tactile like the image
itself senses in some sunlight moving across
some wall showing me something unknowable
Samuel Gilpin is a poet living in Portland, OR, who holds a Ph.D. in English Lit. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 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 chapbooks are Self-Portraits as a Reddening Sky (Cathexis Northwest Press) and As Already Happens (Bottlecap Press). He lives with an increasingly talkative tabby cat and enjoys lifting weights, meditation, and cigars, currently he is pursuing an MA in Vedic literature.