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Dove Song

Poem With 632 Characters

Two Paragraphs from a Perfectly Functional Book

Dove Song

A dove makes a sentence in the window
unendurably the lack of dove

This plausible form thinks itself a garden
predicate to the shape of dove ideas

Now the air is thick, internal
A dove makes a sentence in the window

& a dove-made, noun-less conjecture
makes of the thinker a vacant dove sound

This plausible form thinks itself a garden
unpunctuated by reckless duration

reiterated from margin to margin, where
a dove makes a sentence in the window

unrestrained, a concerted dimmer silence
The weight of dove & the waiting dove

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Poem With 632 Characters

Yes, I’ve said
or thought to say

Yes, I’ve said
nothing & then not

nothing, nothing
of our dusty thoughts

their harmonious
dismantling

of a girl
breathing

into an
umbrella

of a boy
covered in mud

cross–legged
under an ash tree

Nothing of ash
in the shape
of his tongue

or the tongue
of a small elephant
crossing the deserts

of Libya & Liberia
of the Gold Coast
& the Silver Coast

the tarnished coasts
of Toledo, Detroit
Little Tennessee

& the ghostlike
stone face of Hölderlin
disappearing

into an iron sky
into an element
of discourse

arranging a house
into a house whose
arrangement is elemental

This bed might be a lung
This desk a lifeboat

Dear Mark, tell Michael
I have lived many years

without windows
watching daily

from the second floor
waves devouring the shore

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Two Paragraphs from a Perfectly Functional Book

ON SECOND THOUGHT is a sorry way to start catching wind in one’s sail. Nautical! Now we’re getting somewhere. There’s a certain je ne sais quoi to it, as though the word were undulating toward its definition. Although I’m afraid this, as well, is a dead end. Like a simile pushed through a cul-de-sac a sweep of cars shares with the shoreline the convex sound of a thing caving in. On second thought, let’s erase the road. I’m hoping for more specifics here, an innocuous distraction that might offer a spotlight to that serrated leaf, explaining the appearance of its shadow underneath.

THAT when ascribed to traditional techniques for introducing motifs a terracotta levity defines the decorative arts as a scarcity of good building stone erecting a sudden excursion into grotesque erudition is already widely know. What’s not is the role classic doctrine plays in pottery fragments the life of the new state’s packed into its explanation for imperialist antiquity cast as the fledgling mammal meant to elicit a rush of applause whenever it appears to dissolve into vapor. In order to fully illustrate the conceit, our narrator suggests drawing a mastodon without lifting your pen from the paper.

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NOAH ELI GORDON currently lives in Denver.  He is the author of The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003) and The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004) as well as numerous chapbooks, reviews, collaborations & other itinerant writings.  Find information on his books, and links to reviews, essays and poetry here:  http://humanverb.blogspot.com/