An exact comprehension of the composer’s intent
by Noah Eli Gordon
Cloudless sky, a tendril root, a chord begun
as unfolding duration & one’s lost words,
a red lexicon, an empty definition
gathering its discourse—the flow from content
to perception: language is a translation of grace.
Say the body, say the heart, a composition in blue,
the passing energy, cell, motion, inevitability;
an impact until meaning wears through
the mind’s opulence, its spindle—a white thread.
Tethered to conviction, one says moon, one, emotion
—the recurrence of night: a door will open,
shifting from anonymity to intellection—a translation
of sight with speech, awoken not by voice
but what precedes it: the worldliness, wordless;
a measure of sound or movement to song.
From A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow by Noah Eli Gordon.
Letter Home
by Pamela Alexander
I can’t write you because everything’s wrong. Before dawn, crows swim from the cedars: black coffee calls them down, its bitter taste in my throat as they circle, raucous, huge. Questions with no place to land, they cruise yellow air above crickets snapping like struck matches. My house on fire, crows are the smoke. You’ve never left me. When you crossed the river you did not call my name. I stood in tall grass a long time, listening to birds hidden in reeds, their intricate songs. The grass will burn, the wrens, the river and the rain that falls on it. I can go nowhere else: everything I cannot bear is here. I must listen deeper. Sharpen my knife. Something has changed the angles of trees, their color. Do not wait to hear from me. I cannot write to you because this is what I will say.
From Slow Fire by Pamela Alexander.
Snap Judgment 