Noah Eli Gordon

Word For/ Word

An axe splits a tree from the story of a woodcutter's lost children, but who splits you from me? Who splits the lighthouse in half? When heat brings down these separations, what revives you is not the boy with his wrong name, but the name with its wronged boy, an error in place of an outcome. A note about the author, cut with slant adjectives, trips its nouns around like drunks. You know the fable, how its boat filled with water when you held the baby until you weren't certain if its breathing has stopped or just matched your own. There is a tiny blue heart inside this votive & it marbles your house smoke in miniature deletions from a huge marker.

a fiddle pulled from the throat of a sparrow

little piece of silence
astray in the circumstantial music of a crowd
part myth, part massacre
have you put away your toy internment
turned to the first movement
where the house was empty
& the dead hair of the harpist spread on the lawn
its arrayed core drawing a grace note
from the muttering of those exhausted by wild dance
showing an oar for a lyre
a turtle shell a tear
cleaving a bird call on the kettle drum
to unsettle a dust of harmonics
expelling an itinerant elsewhere
an epistolary scratching-post
a winged thing for the gypsy’s chime
the timbrel’s return to nowhere



Dove Song

A dove makes a sentence in the window
unendurably the lack of dove

This plausible form thinks itself a garden
predicate to the shape of dove ideas

Now the air is thick, internal
A dove makes a sentence in the window

& a dove-made, noun-less conjecture
makes of the thinker a vacant dove sound

This plausible form thinks itself a garden
unpunctuated by reckless duration

reiterated from margin to margin, where
a dove makes a sentence in the window

unrestrained, a concerted dimmer silence
The weight of dove & the waiting dove