MiPOesias Magazine

NOAH ELI GORDON

Noah Eli Gordon will have two books appear in 2007: Novel Pictorial Noise (selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series) and A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues). He is the author of The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003), The Area of Sound Called the Subtone, (Ahsahta Press, 2004), and chapbooks from Duration Press, Margin to Margin, Anchorite Press, and Anon Books. Ugly Duckling Presse recently published That We Come To A Consensus, a chapbook written in collaboration with Sara Veglahn. His reviews have appeared in dozens of journals, including Boston Review, The Poker, 26, Jacket, and The St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter. He writes a new chapbook review column for Rain Taxi and teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver. Visit blog.

on dismantling classical vocabulary

Two tragedies occur simultaneously

A hummingbird coming apart in thin sun
is neither first nor the second one

Hear morning recast in sound
the body's trace symmetry

When is the age of analysis not upon us
its orange curtains filtering
twice the sun & twice
the sentence from which sun falls

The difficulty of replicating darkness
too much blue around the black earth
too many binaries making uncomfortable beds

Goodnight air full of astronauts
There is no tree
There is no modernism

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palatial is the compass that shall usher us in

Approximated in charcoal
on paper, thin as drizzle
on a marathon, you want description
to be molting, animalesque—a mandate
counting down to perplexity
Acquiesce to joy!
The blue jay I describe
simply moves away from itself
No anchors! No conscription!
No transactions disguised as traffic!
Ask if there's a castle on the hill
Ask if there's a hill on the hill
Is lettuce on the table still a description?
Ink's ruined everything passes through our papery house
The sun of visual experience passes through our papery house

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perfect gears of industry like an alligator lay in wait exhaling evaporating

Vibratory machinery, grainy
octagons, ambiguously
the photons wend.
All nature poems want
to repeat themselves.
Vibratory machinery, grainy
machinery.