Anniversary

This evening
a black bug arrived
four years ago, becoming
a premonition of
the present, speaking
a language it took me
this long to learn.

A tangled tongue
of stones and fuses.
A grammar built
of broken birds.
Siren pronunciations.

When a window appears
beneath your name,
I try to imagine
a cloud crashing
into a famous building
or mountain. Such a
soft mundane destruction.
What barely is becoming
what barely isn't.

There is no rain today.
The wind is
nice enough to sit again
on concrete by the river.



by jerry gordon
9.26.2014

Beyond Here

There is a woman here
with beautiful ankles
and her thin sweater
on inside out.
She works
on something requiring
sheets of paper
and repeated reference.
She moves
between her phone
and folder
and smoldering smoke.
At the moment
she puts her hands
over her face
as though there may be
answers to find
in darkness,
in hiding,
in touching her skull
in wonder.

The street grinds
three meters away.
A building goes up,
hammer after hammer.
Sports cars creep by.

Beyond,
a blue sky
beyond
autumn clouds.




by jerry gordon
Takamura Coffee
9.13.2014

Moon Heart

Like the moon,
my heart seeks
no constant. It rather
perpetually
abides in tides.

Dark and bright butterflies
group across the
facing hemisphere of
my heart--swarming
in agitated currents
where my flatlands thrust
to mountains, where my lakes
give rise to cities, where my
deserts hold my oceans.

To my mind's eye,
my heart becomes
crescent, half, gibbous
new or full. But my heart
knows no time beyond
or before. Each
mood a movement of
another. The butterflies
float and flit, somehow
unknowing where they are.

You ask if I
can see the whole
even when it's dark.
I say no. But, you can.
You can see where
darks divide and I
don't become the night.
Your eyes are clear enough
to sense where my invisibility
is not the sky.


by jerry gordon
for R
9.2.2014