Noah Eli Gordon's “The Next Year: did you drop this word”

I found a word
  on the floor (aunque)
    Did you drop it?
      Was it something else
    I said expecting full
  acknowledgment?
A truck disappears
  over the transom
    Another fly's
      confusion leaking
    into the light fixture
  Is that an answer?
    Did you drop it
      to augment
    the daring validity
  you were after
    when thank you
      & goodnight's
        the oral tradition
      an argument can't tell?
    Telephone takes
  participants.
There's an animal
  on each end of
    the leash & the most
      complex knots
        are only adornment
      from which one
        might assemble
          the transitory awe
        it takes to justify
          calling anything
        without a frame
          picturesque
        An awful image
      trailing its imagination
    around like a mute
      child asks if
    I'm holding something
  besides my own hand
    Poor architect
      pitiful inventor
        you can be god
      of your very own
    library, call reference
      a sham, shake a huge
        finger at interlocutors
          interrupters, intangible
            elisions & ineffable
              abstract evasive
            comportment, can
          even be a grove
            of trees if you
              carve out ground
            enough to plant them
          So what! Me too!
        Would that a pile
          of leaves were
        an excuse for stomping
      so thoroughly through
    rhythmic decay's mess
      of the day. Trumpet.
        Kick drum. Snare.
          Trumpet. That's a
        directive not ambiguous
      aversion. In an hour
    I'll move my car
      forward ten feet
        All hail self-congratulatory
          autonomy! If I had
            claws. If I had paws
          If I spend a month
        sculpting the soft folds
      of a flower's perfect
    representation
      then we know beauty
        wants us to make
      more of it, which is
    not art, newspapers
  or exchange, but
    the role an indifferent
      actor has in performative
        grace. Adjectives mucking
          up expression, mauling
            the flower with its own
          thorns. Vibrancy spills
        over the view from
      my apartment because
    I want it to
      A dog answers
        to the intonation
      not the name
    I don't mean this
  as an aphorism
where narrative
  sunrise gives narrative
    seasons the tune
      whistled to chop
        a quarter-hour
          off of narrativity's
        chokehold. A poem
      is not a song. It's not
    a pastime. It's not
  a person pretending
    culpability is excused
      by plucking a few
        heartstrings or
          fantasizing radical
            critique as the new chic
              I love the moon
            but that's not it either
          For one gloriously
        troublesome moment
          an ant's forgotten why
            it's hauling a breadcrumb
              It's the moment after this
            one's getting warmer
          How did I hurt your ear?
            You sang in it
              Attention citizens
                I'm not plural
              Modern alienation
            that isn't indifference
          but abundance asks
        how many decent poems
      do you know
    about renting DVDs?
  How many original ideas
can you come up with
  as another example
    of urgency's inability
      to mount to the wall
    anything worth a look?
  Are you against observation
    outside removing yourself
      so far nothing
        remains save degrees
          Dear snowfall
        around a streetlamp
      how radiant am
    I collapsing without
  a thruway to make
    headway in the
      way home is
        a fictitious kill switch
          wired to all the adieus
        of actually having
      somewhere to go?
    Is it better to
      build a machine
        than to see one
      dissolve gracefully?
    The most substantial
  thing I've done is
    eating. A cop says
      "What are you doing
    on this corner?" I say
 "Changing my life!"
    Attention Citizens
      I'm not plural
    (you've said that already)
  A poem runs the risk
of being meaningfully
  a little case study
    illustrating what
      one can fit inside
        Is it ambition blinds
          our bird not wanting
        a worldly thing to do
      with it but better
    (bitter) poems, trading
  a post in the kingdom
of narcissistic vanity
  for some horse feed?
    Mental action's menial
      task, too many removes
        too much mask. Would
          that Joan of Arc stood
        in awe at water trickling
      its tiny-cog-in-the-big-
    machine reminder down
      the shower drain. Would
    that baby in the bathwater's
  a fast acting epiphany
for anyone willing to
  pull the plug on cliché
    It's not that I don't
      have the patience
        for an image; it's that
          I can't imagine one
            without a jolt into
          the actual world
        which is who knows
      how far from where
    we've wound up—here
  staring at ink stains
    to elicit whatever it was
      the window wouldn't
        A century of alienation
          assaulting drainage
            systems. The real
              history of the lyric's
            what we do with our
          runoff until a garbage
        truck rumbling by
          wakes our bird too early
            with the thought
          a city's everything
        outside a citizen
      An objective correlative
    for the ethical obligation
  to account for one's time
    or the Latinate slurry
      of a mind in a hurry?
        Our cab driver calls it
      corruption with flowers
    refuses another poem
  about them & refusal
blossoms into haywire
  tightrope mystique
    meeting best first thought
  under revision's house arrest
rejecting fashionably
  our hypotactic mess
    Thus the explainer's
      containment & container
        I point out the window
      or at the window
    I point out the window
      or at the window
        Balmy architecture
          in place of abstraction
        placing us permanently
      on the periphery
    of the present or
  presently in the
impermanence of talk
  filling the hallway
    as though the tentative
      aggression of a hand
        testing each knob
          turns on its head
            the metonym that's
              otherwise & always
            blah, blah, the body's
          literary device for
        the production of money
      where the people
    march in your poem
      (good for you, let them)
        The people march
      in your poem, enamored
    by the fat police
  grown thin. The people
march in your poem
  enamored by the fat
    police grown thin
  as the prostitutes therein
Good for you
  praise the day, every
    act in your poem's
  a consensual exchange
Good for you
  praise the day, rub
    the cocks & cunts
      of your poem all
        over the polis, all
      over the police, all
    over the marching people
Is there ever a point in cultivating nostalgia? It's not something you water & watch grow. It just happens, hits like a thought. No, that's something you build. I guess I mean it's void of fulfillment, though even that's dubious ground & who'd want to stand outside waiting for the day's instructions? You don't cater to them by letting them prance around full of self-absorption. Statues know they're statues & there's no dignity in that. One might go on & on to a fault & still feel there's a bit of the circle one's forgotten to fill in. It's the geometry to planning out a life & then remembering it was math that held you back in the first place. The addition of a blanket drying on a clothesline in the sun. A porch umbrella locked to a banister. They're not exactly the images of thinking, but they're here in front of me, saying, Look, can't you see the shape of your own head without staring at yourself. Reflections. I'm through with reflections. It starts to amount to something, some kind of big oak door in the way of where you think you need to be & then you're back at home, in bed, regretful for never having tried the handle, if there even was one. Self-conscious as a mockingbird. That's the human point of view for you, always ascribing worth to whatever fits into its own agenda. So what if the weather tears a big hole into your expectations. Is it wrong to wait under an awning until the world gets interesting again? Is it wrong to make a list so you can have the momentary pleasure of crossing things off? Isn't pleasure, like rain, always momentary? I wonder if this is a route to getting beyond one's understanding. The worst dichotomies become the most ubiquitous affirmations. You unfold a thing to feel it I suppose, & then you might cringe or lunge under a table. The mouse probably thinks you're the abrasive one. So why don't we let more things happen instead of treating all of it like a puppet with our hand stuffed into its guts? Is this what glamorous really means? The right light revealing every stitch, that it's all an aborted attempt to try & tailor the way the background looks. I mean you're not even supposed to notice what goes on to the left or the right. It's the center that matters & there's never anything meaningful in that. Someone on the bus has his knee pressed against your own, & you know he's cognizant of it, almost saying worship me, I'm my very best emperor. I used to see the same man several times a week press himself against teenage boys on the train in Boston. Once, I saw him do it to someone in line at the grocery store. It's sad when desire is revolting. I'm better suited to smaller things, but then I'm outside the subject again. There's the immediate oddity of discovering a plaque on a pedestal in the park on a path you'd never taken before, & trying to figure out why someone had chosen this particular spot, but is it different if I'd said finding instead of discovering? My friend Marcus loves to point out moments in film when the boom mic appears at the top of the frame. I guess artifice is exciting if you don't expect it. Fireworks on an off day, which is not a metaphor. Language can be efficacious if you let it wilt a little. That's the better part of desire, to wear your own house like a turtle. Forgive neighbors. Forgive strangers. Forgive bank tellers forced into small talk. There's no significance in forming the dots into an image of your own eye, but we sure waste a lot of time in doing it. Lately, it feels like trying on what you'd never wear or planning a trip you're not going to take. Adventure is overrated. That's why I'm obliged to think art is work.
I take this
obligation
seriously
& then set
it down
with the
same care
given a
porcelain
statue one
needs move
before wiping
the table
& placing
an apple there
Call it the long afternoon made longer when one's attempt to eke from it some modicum of joy, however intangible, gives way to the internal pressure of having to produce a monument to the same effort. This is to say it's only good enough to enjoy eating that apple if the enjoyment is recorded, played back, and tinkered with so endlessly the act becomes a self-consumption, wherein one feels as though led by one's own consciousness toward the weakly-fortified core at the exact center of the self, and forced all the while to carry aloft a banner that reads: Experience eats alive our desire to drive it toward meaning. All day the winds rise & fall, rise & fall, & all day the words flap above you, a cruel taunting gesture, as though you, yourself, were nothing more than text beneath a poem's title, a poor elaboration of a poor adage made poorer still by want of reaching its conceit. And once there, once windows have been shuttered, doors locked, every light dimmed, once the now deserted streets at the center of this place seem in their desolation to be baring the collective teeth from each absent face in your general direction, & the banner, now beaten threadbare, trails like the softest of shackles behind you, who is to say if it was worth it, if such crossings & counter-crossings, so much chiasmic flurry, all the little fits & starts that sent you off only to call you in again at the height of pleasure, who is to say if all this babble, all these finely tuned phrases, all the words trued with a watchmaker's temperament, if all of it were worth trading for the act from which it sprang, if you wouldn't have been better off biting into the apple without the burden of accounting for how you'd later abandon the core.