Walking Into Night

Walking amidst the rhythm of garbage,
an old man selects the boxes of his body,
his home a little nowhere
as lost as every star we've named.

My hand is only this
far from your lips
but you are years away.

I look at the end of us.
I look at the color we painted the winter--
that blue of belonging.
I saw it here on a wrapper,
but now it's gone
as though the moon aborted the sun
and thus shines only of electric Buddhas.

Old man, tonight, take care
of your corrugated coffin.
Take care for the boys I saw
doubled on a bicycle,
riding wild
with the habit of purpose
stitched into their eyes.

They could be evil or they could be gifts.
How to decide from this side of eternity?

I can only half read
the slogans on these walls.
They look marroon,
or maybe umber in this light.

I walk my ignorance
and arrive here
into night.



by jerry gordon
after leaving Spagetti Western closing
4.22.5 / 2.22.6

Speaking Cities

Talking at the back of the room,
we say the word
Poetry
enough to turn every head.
They glance our way,
trying to see beyond
the dark end of the mind
to where we sit in the bronze decor
between boxes from Cuba and the mirror.

The word attracts them,
like some sparrow of incandescence
flitting from thought to thought
with a silver thread and needle,
sewing a logic as light.

Its trace, a pattern
fading in the air.


Russian Canadian American
What do these words mean
to three who can't leave Osaka?

Nothing: the way we recognize each other
in the mirror inside the zero.


Those old men of Zen
used to paint the universe in one stroke--
leaving a break in the continuous wall of form
so emptiness could slip in and out.

Tonight, we walked across the city,
from outside the Loop Line
to somewhere near its center.
We weren't reciting poetry.
We were speaking cities--
and other words for nothing--
into form.



by jerry gordon
for Slava and Michael
2.14.06

Imagine Yourself Quiet

With so little time left before I leave,
I spot you out there
going drowning. Searching
for the perfect pool
or public fountain
to float face-down in.

Your ability to concentrate
on what matters is what I hope
to inherite: how to look
at still water and imagine
yourself quiet within
a halo of ripples.



by jerry gordon
2.7.6

Shades Of Of

If I could mark the blank of this moment
with enough ink to make it nothing,
all would be as complete as it can't resist being.
But here I am
sitting in on subtle shades of of,
trying to lean in and out of the blood
when I could just listen
to the rain of music falling upon me,
as I am.

A dog is chained to its house.

We can't close our ears.
Not for any reason,
and that makes it reason.



by jerry gordon

We Talk into Names

The mystery of the mark--
black and out of center--
taking my eye
and mind with it
into the immediate unknown,
that allusion to that
delicate bitter taste of of
behind your ear.

A lightless fold so close to bone
but beyond the solid and the soft we talk
into names.

This is where I fall,
all the way through the sky
inventing itself between us.

I touch this blank
with just enough aphasia to let it be
but with too much me
to leave it nameless.



by jerry gordon

Abandoning the Solid

The wall is where we start.
From there we can't resist departing
and abandoning the solid. We touch
and it is touching myself.

I let the ocean fall from my hands as rain.
At such times I almost know generosity.
I almost fathom the infinity of
your patience,
letting each foot fall in its print
and each head loll in its sleep.

This is the language I read in dream billboards--
the city of poetic highrises
where words are building the sky
as a slightly unfinished sentence.
I read it
for as long as I can leave off understanding it
as what I want.

What does it mean?

I'm still afraid enough to ask that.



by jerry gordon

My Buried Treasure

The sky is up there
in all its rickety silence and speed,
surrendering the seeds of our daydreaming
and sleepy belonging.

I'm calling you from a room
beneath the street. Its walls
are all alive with lines scratched by poets
and other archeologists of the lateral crash.

There are people here.
They don't know me either.
We have this much in common
and so can smile on account of it.

Dreaming this morning.
Things have started and they've taken
the form of sound, like the roaming
grace of children let loose, like
the destruction preceeding the creation of
another, like the echos I've exhaled
into 10,000 glass jars and hidden for those
who will inherit eternity.

My buried treasure:
A door swinging open on the trust of morning light.
A man with a name sewn inside his hat.
A fork stuck into a wall.

I know the last line of this poem
but don't know how to get there,
except to say,
"Your photograph will never fade."



by jerry gordon
1.29.06
cafe independants, kyoto

Because I have been waiting

It is about you,
because I have been waiting this long
to look across the sky that falls between us
and say, "Your hands are the memory of
holding that I want to take
into the next life like a name
of royalty sewn inside my hat."



by jerry gordon

Wait!

I can't see her eyes
but I can see they are
the saddest eyes; the ocean
holds a million shipwrecks.

The danger of your throat
before you wrap your muffler on
and leave. I won't say, "Wait!"

That would change nothing
and I don't do that today.



by jerry gordon

Our Hands Never Reach

Here
I sit in this spot,
my arrangement of care
shining and throwing shadows
clear to the end of the table,
to where the dark gathers.

With a woman in mind,
I draw a face on a napkin.
It always contains me
and you. For ever,
any purpose is enough
to get us here as us.
Our hands never reach.
That's how it is we've been
sitting long enough
to not say more than the silence
makes complete.

Touching my wrist,
I shift time.
With the end so close,
I can wait another pulse
of the kalpa mechanism
before opening my eyes
to your eyes.
But, I won't. I try,
because you're there.



by jerry gordon
1.9.5
cafe independants, kyoto
(found in my winter jacket)

Waterproof and Wet

Before arriving here
we were strangers.
Now, we depart,
but carrying this seed
friends exchange.

My daughter asks,
"Where did that cloud
reflected in the river go?"
I dip my hands in to the wrists
and shake them at her face.
She screams in gleeful protest.

My watch drips--
both waterproof and wet.

I wonder how polluted
the Yamatogawa River is.



by jerry gordon
1.29.06

Improvization

The room is full of
empty sounds
and how one's thought bleeds
through another's vein.

Take this echo from my lips
and carry it atop your fingertips.
Don't be careful with it.
Make it push your heart
through your rhythm.
How else to call it
music? How else to make
your eyes shine enough
to wash all the rivers of
the world clean with a single drop,
carried less than careful,
from what was then
to now?



by jerry gordon
1.29.06
cafe independants, kyoto