Poem suite / Gabriel Dunsmith

Photo: Cat Gundry-Beck.

Date Night

The bottle’s empty.

My body is yours, just ask.

Paint me keen and blue.

Salamander, Say Goodbye

to the stream and its smooth pebbles, to the spores

and slippery surfaces, to suddenness, to loam,

to your skittering below stones, to the squelching

of wet earth, suppleness of sinew, bone-biting cold 

of hoarfrost, to spells, to the sound of softly-

clanging cymbals (as life is born and snuffed out),

to the breath of meadows and speckled starlight 

of your eyes, to forests made of moss, to the world

you once knew.  The water’s drying up like skin.

Two Ships

In the night, darkness.

In the morning, more darkness.

Your tongue probed my ear.

Sojourn

We entered the glen

as into a thick dreaming,

our surroundings unknown, yet known

to blackthorn, bog, and briar.

Neither tree nor trellis

we saw: just the town 

straddling a trembling stream

in the shadowed socket of the hill.

Somewhere a bird

dropped from a cliff,

somewhere a falconer

called to the untrammeled air.

From far off, the walls

and spires seemed a crop

of the land’s making:

more rockfall or forgotten copse

than human realm.

A breeze, bramble-brushed,

threatened. We all felt it

and turned the car around.

The clouds closed

over that darkened place,

and ever since

I have burned to go back.

Visitor

Cold river swelling,

your song now mist, the moon stopped

by my windowsill.

/ Gabriel Dunsmith grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States and lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.  His poems have appeared in Poetry, Tikkun, On the Seawall, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  He was a finalist for the 2023 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize.

NWCC give thanks for these new poems!