Hecatomb of a Fingernail

hecatomb: (noun); an ancient Greek sacrifice of 100 oxen or cattle


These poems are monuments,
like small heads of cows
drawn in the fog
of bus windows.

A hecatomb
of a fingernail.

It's my job.
I mark
these epics of brevity:
an old man with
two fingers to his face,
a square of paper
on a green bus bench,
meeting a woman's glance
as we look away from others.

These are the rain of
a purposeless courage,
touched now
while we remember
we're dying.



by jerry gordon

Castles of Smoke

.
This spark lands here,
shining from the distant
sun; your eyes
are depthless but still
I search their ocean ends.

At every turn, I exhale
a tiny castle of smoke
to mark how lost
I'm becoming.
This way I know
there's no way
out.

Orpheus was right
when he said to not look back,
but when have I ever
done what I believe?

Show me any poet's feet
that are clean or dirty.

Behind me,
I watch the arabesque ruins of smoke
going to gone along my rippling trail.
I can't blame the walls
for their decay. It's within them
to die. My lungs
release each turbulence of calm
to mark the air.

What fades fades
into nothing. Lost,
I know I'm
nowhere.



by jerry gordon
4.28.5

Other's Steps

.
Your mouth has become this flower
and the wind
on which my shadow breathes.

I sit, always in the empty
room of your illegible script,
where each shelf erodes
beneath the buzz-blur of wings,
where I can leave
my black pen on the floor
knowing a dragonfly is born
in the cellophane mud
singing the Kamogawa.

Memory is a hand-sized stone.
The space between our distances,
our steps along each other's steps.

Enough,
arrange the petals
and tune the breeze, speaking
the voice at the ear.

I place my hand here
for you, trusting you will
never pass this flower again.



by jerry gordon

Passing Strangers

.
Seeing bodhisattvas and dragon librarians here,
and thinking they're commuters
writing small notes,
sipping canned-coffee and paging
through sheet music on the train.

I look up and see
four young soccer players in green shorts
and socks bounce into the train.
Their eyes each glowing
like undersea moons,
teeth pointing every which way.

Clearly,
they have studied the 'passing strangers
on opposite sides of a building' teachings.

With a steady integrity of themselves,
they, of course, get off at Hagoromo station.

My only regret: I didn't ask their age
and which direction is north.



by jerry gordon

Stranger Radio

I sit here rolling in judgements of
haircuts and double-chins and those
legs crossed beneathe so much perfect
mascara.

"Don't bring me down."

What was it about
writing on sugar
that I once thought?

It is
such forgetting that will
have me falling
from the sugar sack
into animals, ghosts
and hell.

The radio is saying, "Fuck"
and "26 dollars in my hand."

You could hear a pen drop
beneath my table
from the distance
where there is the unexpected
"Thank you."


by jerry gordon
3.15.5 KIX cafe

Thai Airways Flight TG775

In his saffron reality,
waiting for the toilet
to clear,
the monk works inside
his Thai rectangle of
sky, as though building a cloud
from within--
the form becoming
with all that mystery
of Time, aging
children and being lost
in a song.

The engines are out there
compressing the darkness.
I can almost whistle
their dissonant tune.



by jerry gordon
3.15.5

Meeting in Departures

Traveling these weeks of
silence, it has become
arriving
this far to this close
to you in the same coordination
of color, clothes and beer, of
you too writing the unknown
in just such the way
that everything has
to signal a poet of a poet--
eyes at the ceiling
turned to an angle
tuned to the expanses between
too much and too little,
and handling the rhythmic pen
like all those hovering dragonflies
on the Kamogawa.

What ripples here?

It is the weight of
humanity in transport
and the fuselages barely
disturbing the wind.
It is what translates
everything into this visible surface
atop my beer and spans
the two steps of distance between
us.

It is
and this is
how I recognize
you.



3.30.5 LAX bar
by jerry gordon