20: SUBMERGED
Jane Gibian: gesture
suspended inside someone's life:
all day, fleets of curdled white clouds
shuffle across the sky & some fragile
thing held in you untwists deftly
to follow the body's gestures; unthinking,
stumbling through the pretence
of fast-capitalism: there are no words
to describe it yet there are so many;
your heart aches with the awkward
three-dimensional shape of them:
in a time of incoherence the untwisting
in your throat strangles any clear
word that might rise like a plea
for some kind of salvation,
in which you don't even believe
Jane Gibian's first collection of poetry, The Body's Navigation, was published in 1998. In 2002 she was an Asialink Literature Resident in Hanoi, Vietnam.