Peter Gorham

hope

Today I cannot look myself in the eye.

The tall pines that stood for me

And set their lovely shade around my heart

Have all been massacred by the machine.

Those straight masts and moonwhite sails

That rose up like promises yesterday over the horizon

Have since changed course and carried

Their cargo to another port. My body still

Flourishes like a mountain stream in the spring melt,

But my spirit feels the first early winter frost.

I wish I were that great cross of wings, the albatross

That my body dreams itself to be. I wish

That something would bloom in the night

Taking its form slowly and carefully

In the cool of the darkest hours, dividing itself

From the emptiness, drawing up from the Earth

A new name and a clear voice, and become a prayer

So that God would see it and lean to catch

Its fragrance, in the first hour of a morning

Glistening with fresh dew. I wish I were

A country-strung garland, to crown and guard

The center of my body’s door forever.

curvature

When we became clever the Earth shrank itself

Into the head of a pin, surrounded by angels

Its curvature now a real number with infinite digits.

There are rivers in the skies, and swept down one of them

I find myself far from you, months away but only hours away.

How can we really learn what space is, its viscosity,

When the heat is always set to a boil? At midnight

The Moon stands upended, its light arriving in a heartbeat.

If only my life could bend more easily than the space I am in.

Instead the clay jar around my scroll

Fractures easily. My words dry up and fragment

Dispersing like flakes of ash into the white noise.

But a music of meaning still stands unbodied somewhere;

Well-tempered, no ratios of numbers will capture it today.

Lacking words, but curving around the Word itself,

The Reason, the Logos, the one and clearest ringing note no

Bell can yet attain. When it rings

Our bones will gather again

And body themselves into an army.

~ used with permission from Wipf and Stock publishers ~

Peter Gorham lives, works, sails, and surfs in Honolulu, Hawaii. As an undergraduate at UC Irvine in California he studied poetry and later physics, and now teaches physics as a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.