Gilbert Allen

26

Gilbert Allen

Ancient for a gymnast? True. But boyish for starting quarterbacks,

callow for first-year congressmen. Depressing as a debutante's enviable waistline, or her final exam in math. Yet how godly for the Sunday back nine holes at Augusta National!

Irons (forged FE 26) just made that green jacket happen.

Keats died in sight of 26— less than three to the third power, more than five raised to the second. No time to overtake Shakespeare or even Milton, but enough perhaps to sweep the 35s.

Quantifiable Arabic replacement for XXVI

space/time dimensions, albeit too old for Selective Service, underage for a senator. Versed well in Psalm 136 (where His mercy endureth as X in some divine equation,

Yahweh in numerology) Z's our latter-day Omega.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021

Just Like This

Gilbert Allen

The peach sits on the kitchen windowsill, his face upon it in the tempered glass reflection. Breakfast, in a few days. Still

the ripened peach sits on the windowsill forgotten, while he takes his final pill.

And this is how flesh always comes to pass.

The rotting peach sits on the windowsill, no face upon it in the tempered glass.

Gilbert Allen's most recent books are Believing in Two Bodies (a collection of poems) and The Beasts of Belladonna (a collection of linked stories). Since 1977 he has lived in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, with his wife, Barbara.