Aught, no. 11/12 (2003)

Noah Eli Gordon / from Jaywalking the Is

« Back   |   Next »

I've got eight minutes in the sway tank. It trembles, a mercury ball along speaking lines, a coat caught on a nail, coming off. Could the clients be any less electrifying? the lighthouse out of range? Phone dash. Felt lace. Who said if someone lets you back in the house, it doesn’t mean you should stay home? American memory wears a lawsuit. Tailor me an hour without something to fill, white sheets or red curtains. What else is useless as an elephant gun? A century of green leaves or some leftovers? Night, & someone’s face is at the window when the lights are on. How can you be humble, living on a hill, owning so many jackets? When there’s no such thing as wilderness, I’ll leave the backdoor open.

Articulating despair or articulation of despair in the dishes needing to be done. I rubbed the image from so much excess. The screen porch where love is childlike & receding. Thursday followed by another Thursday & they arm themselves like that. A slender arm in the foreground. Who doesn’t have a body to harness willful redemption, a handmade atlas of the world? These illustrated pictures have taken their gloves off & wait in the living room for the artist to arrive. Sketch me in here. I’ve been hiding all morning.

The graphite flakes off, leaves marks where I hadn’t intended. Fingerprints on a phone book or a catalog of the afternoon’s complication. Is there a partner to self-deification, a pattern in how we navigate each other’s resistance? Suddenly could be the sorriest adverb to wrench the assembly line to a halt. I’d considered calling it a day, but there were still echoes to unchime. Bees encoded in bushes encoded in bronze work ending in the probability that an event will occur, given that another has or will do so.

If terror cake seems too cute, why not try extending the idea; everything orbits its own frequency, turns back at some point. If you’re lucky, it’ll burn with the woodpile. If you’re waiting, try to relax. A firm persuasion can remove mountains & redundancy makes for efficient advertising. Here money fish, how ‘bout a harness? I hadn’t given much thought to the framework of morpheme thinking. Tick, tick, goes the mouse. Tick tick, goes the house. Although it’s enough to crack manifest destiny’s guardrail, the coastline couldn’t stop us from swerving into such an untranslatable world. & we’re under water anyways.