WORK
BY NOAH ELI GORDON
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Excerpts from THE FREQUENCIES
101.7
There's a certain pace to the persistence of everything: geese, evergreens, a clock rings out but it doesn't mean we have to go anywhere in waves or particles. The light digresses, things are wound: geese, evergreens, a clock rings out but it doesn't mean. That's incidental to nothing. These fake hours can't wish you in the next room, saving what? the sun-bleached back of a ladybug? Landscape is an antecedent to environment, so the day sours as usual. There's poignancy in keeping one's mouth shut, in pine needles, which also fade. That's incidental to everything. Some birds flap their wings to keep the air moving; I just stare at the clock radio, wondering why the numbers don't flip.
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105.1
It takes a face made for radio to answer most rhetorical questions without hitting the harmony when one's going for the root note. After I told you I couldn't stand to read the real naked, it was inevitable that you'd answer by asking what kind of pure, perfect thing is logic. Sure, my skeptical-way-of-dealing-with-sarcasm statuary intrudes a bit on form, but who's going to write the postscript to a horrendous occasion if the marble can't make the sculptor see anything but her own reflection? You wanted to know how biography hatches like houselights full-on when even the actors are fishing for a comma to pause this cascading, used-car-lot soliloquy, so we quoted Dickens, did the police in different voices, until the new siren song was only another rock anthem pushing us underneath the backwash that bibliography brings to it. Understand, it's not that I don't respect the Greek gods. It's just they've got nothing to do with us.
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92.7
When you gave your daughters a sackcloth of gunpowder to rub underneath my knees, the dead oil for each elbow, the cell wall's burning paper, was it my eyes you were asking for? My private moon? There's a red light tucked somewhere close to the clinking of glass, & I mean left of the lion subject outside the screen. Someone was translating the static into dust & back again. Listen, I'm tinkering with trace elements here. Punching holes to pry the copper piping from my mother's insect voice.
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87.9
The collage radio in pieces on a pedestal in Musée Picasso. Graffiti outside in English reading: Satie swallowed the piano whole because Serge Gainsbourg always wanted to be an American. You found a lipstick stain inside my radio, said I knew someone else was listening. "That's the thing about it," I told you, "radio is a collective agreement to a community built & maintained in private." You turned up the volume. "How do you explain those kissing sounds?" you asked. "One gets lonely," I said, "sometimes to get the feel of a thing you've got to take it apart." I meant to imply the ability to render three-dimensional figures by cutting them up & flattening them on the canvas. I meant to uncross my fingers, to stand a few inches back, to say something to the security guard besides I'm sorry things look more real from this far up.
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107.7
The interior weather of a trampoline unfolds a reflex response to gravity. I ran from the car up all five flights so I wouldn't miss the next song, so nothing would be bronzed & gathering dust on the mantle to surface in the hidden symmetry of the subplot. The signals moved along each wall, ended up overflowing the bed like bitter wind chimes, the park bench ambivalence of another random heart. The windows were open & I could hear people laughing from the roof. It was good. The bed was full. The radio was stiff & prim & explosively still.
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99.3
Because my brother didn't hear me when I told him to hold the bird calmly, because there's nothing confessional about waiting for the bees to come, because they forwarded me a batch of the letters you marked return to sender, because I had to steal the keys to the station, because the scissors broke on the binding, because the radio fails to gather symbolic form in the rhetoric of silence, because we don't embody anything like an airplane flying over Wyoming & covered in light, because I left the little red book in the back pocket of the seat in front of me, because I wouldn't call it a ready-made radio, admit the danger in getting too deep into anything, because there's difficulty in differentiating between the work I've done & the way I handle the impulse to unbuild it all, because understanding is outside the static, because it didn't appear anywhere on the bandwidth, because it's sentimental to send flowers, because someone requested California Dreaming, because the Rolodex is already outdated, because the smell of burnt leaves is nostalgic for nothing, because it helps with happy endings, because I'm unable to listen for more than a few minutes without wanting to write myself in, because it takes stillness to see motion, because there's a white-picket-fence ideal, because the treaty was a washout, because the card-catalog century is enough to whistle the afternoon gray, because at the station I could imagine this one or that one, because they're alone, because they're dancing, because they're on the road, because they're between places, because they're listening, because they're always there & just this or that, because I'm afraid of getting to the point of proper names, because there are call letters, because they've sunk so far below the idea of surface, the little bubbles take years to make it home & this new city is empty enough that its seams are starting to show.