Noah Eli Gordon
We are to the left of the lions
Hovering like helicopters
In buttery-dark night
This is a powerful song
And I’m its mother so I can touch it
My daughter says so many things
But I’m attentive only to words
This morning there were these
Cut out the mermaid and leave the sea
The Rhythm
For years
You followed
Happily
The drums
Until you
Figured out
You were
Supposed to
Come after them
And that
They’re not
At all
The same
Another Vague California Lyric
It’s just a title
Which is an argument
For the validity
Of what comes after
But what happens
When what comes after
Requires no validation
And is itself nothing
More than the echo
Of some far off
And wholly absent sound
Surf’s up sun’s down
Something Spoken Softly
At a podium on fire on a porch
Something spoken softly
In a bed on a train out a window
Something spoken softly
To a child the total stranger
That I undoubtedly makes of you
Noah Eli Gordon lives in Denver and teaches in the MFA Program at CU-Boulder. More info can be found here: http://www.noaheligordon.com/news. He writes, “My work here comes from among a group of hundreds of poems composed entirely on my iPhone in less than five minutes each between late 2016 and 2017. After over 25 years as a practitioner of the art of poetry, I wanted to see if a dedication to presence and immediacy might offer itself as a balm against the technology that serves otherwise to eradicate the art from both of these conditions.”