Poems by ​Forrest Gander 

​Aubade
 
 
 
Can you hear dawn edging close, hear   ・   soft light with its vacuum fingertips   ・ 
 
gripping the bedroom wall, an understated   ・   what? exhilaration? Can you hear the
 
voices,   ・   if they can be called voices, of towhees    ・   scratching in the garden and
 
then    ・   the creaky low husky    ・   voice flecked with sleep beside you in bed   ・ 
 
telling a dream slowly as though in real time,    ・   and now, interrupting that dream,
 
can you    ・   make out the voice, if it can be    ・   called a voice, of absence speaking  ・ 
 
intimately to you, directly, I know   ・   you must hear it feelingly, a low vibration in   ・ 
 
your bones, for don’t you find yourself    ・  absorbed in a next moment beyond your
 
given life? 




Immigrant Sea
 
 
Aroused by her inaccessibility, he aches for more
of her life to live inside him. Watching
 
                                                                               the breakers, standing so close he can feel
                                                                                    heat coming off her wet scalp. What is
 
his relation to this person
before him, so familiar and foreign? The way
 
 
                                                         he searches out her face, he searches out himself. Gusts
                                                                               thrash crests of swell, spring grasses twirl
 
 
 
circles in the sand where they stand without speaking. She
wants him to know it’s all charged, even grass
 
 
 
                                                                        positive, pollen negative, so when grass waves,
                                                        it sweeps the air for pollen. He feels electricity all around
 
 
 
as though the wild drama of the coming storm were already
aware of them, foreigners on this shore. Little
 
 
                                                                                 sapphire-blue flowers speckle the dunes.
                                                                            He wonders if he has let himself flatten out
 
 
into a depthless sheet, like escalator stairs, whether in the end
he’ll disappear underground without the smallest lurch
 
 
 
                                                        of resistance. But when her lavish face turns toward him
                                                                             beaming, the corners of her eyes wind-wet,
 
 
he yields to that excess, he reappears to himself.

Forrest Gander (born 1956) is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new collection Twice Alive came out in May this year at New Directions.

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