Aught, no. 11/12 (2003)

Noah Eli Gordon

How do you carry the dailyness of it & still render a dust storm. There was chatter from the bellows. We passed a dairy farm, an outdoor well, things that exist for us as tactile perception—things piled under their expectations. I feel awful about my new shoes, but I love them also. We make different excuses. Chastity, outmoded as any horseshoe. How the bees come back, how the sailors arrive, how I love the radio because it listens.

If the expressivities of the human face are mirrored in the eyebrows of dogs, if they learn because we tell them to, if someone fills out an application in a few minutes, lands a job, makes dinner, dreams herself an ownership, then are we stealing from or assembling one another? Used-up nation, here’s my new riding saddle. It was too late to answer the phone. Often I’d rather say it differently, turn it on the exchange, the progress of another week’s clemency, but there are feathers in the flowerbeds. I’m not exaggerating, look at how high the house is.

Mathematically speaking, floodgates braced, facial rudiments in full view, I’m more than a door between the Arabic number for last in line and the length a kite will go before the string is completely taut. Wind was a factor, swept water another. And what are the koan slingers doing now, field wiring? Once the train arrived, no one dared to stand. We didn't want to appear overly eager, unjustly relieved. I was fingering the novel in my coat sleeve, worried it would slip out, wondering if the others were as tense as how I'm sure I must have seemed. Dotted line. Pencil lore. Is it wrong to ask for a difference between done & finished, an already is?

You can cinderblock the dead city, dilute it with ink, with a fine-toothed comb, some character dust in the day play. It's hard being a drama hound, cradling luck, shelving the days into a warehouse—a holding dock without a working lock. Time passes or thickens or falls from a jar. Never anything as exciting as someone on a window ledge, but maybe it’s a good sign. Maybe cartography’s the way to go. When were maps more useful, after you learned to dance or before your first loss lesson? & when would that cocktail alter the works? The band takes requests from the bandstand. What figures, from anybody's guess.

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