The Friend's Arriving

I'm looking forward to your books
arriving before you do
so I can lay down in their fields
and mat down their grasses--
the mysterious patterns of
the invisible reader.

Evaporated footprints in the margins.

I wash my feet in the stream
and then again walk wet;
what poet's feet
are clean or dirty?

This is the kind of conversations
we will have,
even from opposite banks of the river.

Each sound is a sound
of you arriving.



9.20.05

As though

The word
that overflows
all
the memory in your
eyes; these oceans of
our momentary motions.

What better words
to say,
emotions?

But for your hands
we would fall;
as though there is
somewhere else
to land
here.



by jerry gordon
9.14.05

Falling Down

No one else can fall down for you.
It's all your own
embrace with gravity
and the intimate percussion of splat.

That!
That's the face
we all know firsthand
rising up through hands stinging
like the smallest sands of fire.

And I can imagine the earliest man
followed your ritual lead:
standing up, wiping his hands
down his hairy pants
and then clapping two or three times
in the way that has come to mean,
"I'm done with this."



by jerry gordon
inspired by seeing a 2 year-old boy trip and fall
9.13.05

For a Weed in a Brick Wall

Now is the season
of weed glory,
when their ragged leaves
outlive the fame of flowers
and sing their subtle shades
of fade.

Decay contains a special luster.

The muted greens
and red-vein lines
that reach down each leaf's spine
are signs of light's betraying brevity.

I'm sure to some it is no mystery
and there are dances for weed bonfires.

But I'm no longer some. I'm one
now with this inherited affinity
for the worthless. A seed
that landed in a wall
with enough dirt, sun and rain
to take root, bloom and now begin



by jerry gordon
9.12.05

As Fallen Flowers Do

Ophelia floats within
her world of fluid blues.
Watching the past grow faint upstream,
she dreams of gravity
and our only moment.

Her shoulders fall.
Her hair looks full of wind.
A bubble escapes from her lips,
rising past paper flowers folded for emotions:

Irises of papyrus for guessing.
Roses of vellum for rememberance.
A hyacinth of cigarette foil for doubt.

They float around her breasts
as fallen flowers do; obscuring
what is too beautiful.
They will never get to burn
and leave their lines of smoke in our eyes.
For that, we must imagine
beyond what is and isn't
possible.



by jerry gordon
for a Chika Yoshii painting at Panarama 9.10.05

Risk

Outside a coffee shop,
three people look at an x-ray of a spine
on a computer screen.

Slow motion nomadism

We should practice
carrying each other
into burning buildings
without danger.

The most powerful mind-altering agent is patience.

Passing,
an old woman bumps against me;
not a breast--
a pacemaker.

Freedom is the ability to do anything, not merely what I want.

She constructs small stupas
for insects she finds dead
in her apartment or elsewhere.
I saw her save a large black bug
that fell into a red bucket for fire.
Afraid to touch it,
she poured the bug and the water out.

Carry a drop of water to the ocean; wash it clean

A beautiful shadow on a woman's ankle, she said:
"Even though you're working
to save us all, don't become trapped
by seriousness. You must be laughing
to help all beings."



by jerry gordon

Waking Ourselves from Death

The sky is torn from mountain tops
and we sit here and hold each other's eyes.
The lies we keep to keep ourselves
asleep and tempered with this tenderness.
"God bless. God bless." I've seen you
when at rest and I believe the knowledge
of your lips. Believe the multi-layered glimpse
we live. Believe this brutal brevity. Believe
the width of every dream,
and the doubt it textures. Conjecture. Conjecture.
I paint the city walls with all the whispered names
for no one, let the bluish-black acrylic
flash across the night, peel the screen of heaven down
to blanket all our beds, the quiet of the house of lead.
The dread. The dread. The river of what's said.
The storm clouds on the morning of the light
that bathed your head. The bird song in the warning
of the city where we met. I said you said it's said,
our hands are always open, open to what's left,
open to receiving every drop of word that's read.
Believing each deception, because we're fictional at best,
but leaning out to kiss you, kiss you on the head, kiss you
on the neck, kiss you in this moment
when we wake ourselves from death
as a way to not forget.



by jerry gordon

This Kind of Weather Isn't Summer

The leaves on the trees are still
at just a kissing-stage with the sun;
they don't yet know
it's a very old lover.

By mid-summer,
they will start to suspect
the sun is far too experienced
to be their age
or faithful.

What else could explain
the beauty of autumn?



by jerry gordon
5.05

21 Words for Your Left Breast

Everybody says the eskimos
have 20 words for snow
as though that example
best captures the truth of
each thing's subtle complexity.

Well, I have 21 words
for just your left breast
this morning,
and each is untranslatable
and by noon expired from currency.

Four words described your left breast's shape
in the minutes before you woke
as you shifted against the mysteries in a dream.

Seven more conveyed your left breast as
qualities of weight when in my hand and mouth
and when against me and the sheet
at different angles.

Five words generalized it as stages of arrousal
with special nuances on its density against my tongue
and the nipple's degrees of eraser-like gumminess.

One was for it when I suddenly closed my eyes
and it echoed as a retinal ghost.

Three were for it as tastes.

Two were it as poetic inspirations
that, as yet, have no meaning
in the world or mental awareness.
(Thus they have been excluded from my sum of 21.)

And the last word was for your left breast as
it hung above me like a sky heavy with rain
and I completely lost track of what it even was.

So, the eskimos can keep their 20 words for snow
and can teach them to philosophy students.
I'll just try to pay attention
as the dictionary of your body writes itself in my eyes
and then vanishes before anyone can nod in understanding.



by jerry gordon
9.4.05

Man

Man
sitting splay-legged and filthy
beneath a plastic yellow play slide in Nagai Park,
you have all the signs
of a lengthy addiction
coming to this fruit of jittery-tension
and I can see all the cities
of your body singing
to by soothed.

What holds your bones together
inside your hard leather hide?
Is it your constant hum-talk and nodding
with this unseen panel of questioners?
Or is it your inaudible whisper
back into that
sibilant roar of dope?



by jerry gordon

Footprints in the Margins

photo: Bengt Wanselius


There is no one living here;
I'm merely leaving
an abundance of
abandoned houses,
each of their pages
rattled back to wood
by wind and rain
and other excesses
catalogued under the rituals
of reading.

You will never find me.
The only trace is footprints
in the margins.
In this way, know
we have walked
these words into roads.
We have passed ourselves
as strangers--
most intimate.



by jerry gordon

Spolia

Like an offering to Reason
I bury your face
inside my brow
and build this new closed room
from the spolia of we;
the memory on your motorcycle
and the quiet crimes that weave the family
where there are no grave sites
and everything that's dead is gone
and what's unknown is deadly.

Born a bastard, this is my birthright,
to inherite each abandonment. To build
from broken pasts.

What is it about
blood that we love so much?



by jerry gordon

Beyond the Edges

I've come to where the house of mind
is abandoned. My job is to stir the bath.
With one arm bare to the shoulder,
I keep the grime
and dregs of our bodies churning--
the language of liquid
floating it all in flux.

Dead skin drifts with curls of hair
and lint from infinite belly buttons.
I just stir,
playing some part in its playful patterning.

This is the only crime I claim no guilt from.

spiral galaxy
hydrogen electron density
pedestrians through a concourse

Some students of history have asked
if I don't get cold kneeling beside the tub,
but temperature is of no concern.

I've learned this isn't about "good" or "bad."
It's about becoming
beyond the edges of a dictionary.



by jerry gordon

A Trespasser

I come out of my door
in the big-drop rain
and find a man taking shelter
beneath my eave,
like some elderly angel
in a soaked white shirt,
an odd pattern printed on his chest.

My first thought is he's my daughter--
the girl whose name means Dream.
But she never looks at me
with the humble eyes of a trespasser.
She'd never appologize
for being on the stoop.
She does not have
the thick skin of the sun
around her eyes.

So, to find him here
feels like catching a glimpse
at a mirror of a future;
a man paused by rain
using a tiny roof to wait
for the sky to dry.
A stranger, enough like me
to one day be me, unknown
but just beyond the door.



by jerry gordon

Underground Mountains

I've walked this line
through underground mountains--
set in a frame of rusting steel
because we all need
to define our beyonds.

It has hung here
longer than this wall
of smokey exhalation,
longer than these scratches
and shadows of language, longer than
the medicinal glisten of liquid
down the pin-wheel woman's arm.

From a bite of
a tiny mouth of
poison.

No wind turns the paper.
Other ways get work done.

The longing of a finger
for an itch.

I've found a way to become
unknown enough to lose my way
in these fading valleys of printed topography
hovering above accordian cries
and the textures of linen and hair.

With your shoulders the horizon
and your spine defining the ridge,
I pile stones on stones
and sweep,
the path clean.



by jerry gordon

Approaching the Zoo Station

Ever as complete
in it's compacted echo--
beauty's subtle reply.

We do not die
each day we sleep;
we tell the grass our song.
We lift a stone
from a place
and put it into place.

No time for this;
time because of this.

Across from me,
a man's black shoe,
sewn in 10,000 mirrors,
has now
become his shadow. It fits
and with it all the mouthes
that chewed the years
of somewhere's grass
are here with him
grazing
the silent valley
between these Osaka subway benches.

To his right,
a woman in eight shades of blue
has a butterfly of steel
on her ear. It must be
a prayer for confidence, as is
my own copper circle of the universe.

I can almost hear you, voice
at my ear. The question in my mind
as ever, "Are you here?"



by jerry gordon

It's Afternoon

It's not everlasting,
it's just the afternoon
and with it we're completed
in our flawless incompletion.
It's not tender.
It's not new.
It's just what we are going through
and that's the Big Bang culmination
of God's first exhalation of the word.
The honest ease of all our struggle.
The indigo dragonfly's flutter.
The dust and magic song of rust
as it takes us back to grass
beyond our longing. Our belongings
coming back from all these
strangers' pockets.



by jerry gordon

It Asks

"Why are you here?" it asks.
I'm here to drop the bubble of poetry into your vein,
to commit the necessary crimes of shame and grandeur,
to abandon every mask of self I love and therefore fall in hate with,
to set the clock forward and back,
to always be arriving in the chariot of doubt,
to learn how to carry each person into burning buildings,
to film this slow-motion car crash.
I'm here to ride the tattoo ink and build castles of smoke,
to appear,
to drift beyond sanity,
to keep each creek in tune,
to miss the chances others take
and paint a single corridor of mind with soot and prophesy.
I'm here to lose my way and every sense of punishing sureness.
I'm here to be fearless
because what matters is to get hit in the face, to smile in photos
and to encircle my arms with flowers.
My healing and decay ressemble my mirror of pride and envy.
I'm here to touch the surfaces of water,
to ruin what I've worked for and ignore what's important.
I'm here to look into your eyes as you look away,
awaiting your return before I flee into dream bedrooms.
I'm here to lock doors wide open and collect the nails of effects.
I'm here to beg and be betrayed, as is every bastard son's birthrite.
I'm here to breathe and never cease returning.



by jerry gordon