Future Calendar

The sky is seeping in on a voice
that isn't Elvis Costello
but is enough
to ply those emotions of tender brutalities
born 20 years ago.
Your sunken living room
and hi-fi on the floor.
The woman working the expensive black paper
over there has skin that explodes
from her chest like a plentiful shiny mountain,
like a field of infinite shiny grain.
If Elvis mated with the Beatles,
this ceiling's voice would be that spawn.
It's possible, you know,
that I studied literature because I love
the look of women who like books.
It's a theory
I'm entertaining tonight.
Or, perhaps it's women handling paper.
Or, simply, women in their majority,
because there is something so beautiful
about a woman amidst women who are not quite friends.
Women in teams. Women working with women.
This perhaps locates my long realized attraction
to concentration as a behavior that makes me stop and gaze.
Such staring women have economies of beauty
that surpass any glamour.
Busy girls.
Could be a geek calendar: 12 pictures
of un-makeuped women focused on
removing something from a press
or choosing a certain tube of paint
or reading a line of text
or cutting the edge off an expensive photograph.
Women reading Art Week.
Women designing cool chairs or a new system
for cataloging music by sonic intimacy rates.

That's a calendar I'd like to be given.



by jerry gordon
12.19.08
Standard Books Cafe, Osaka