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. Copyright © 2007 by Noah Eli Gordon. Reprinted with permission of New Issues Poetry & Prose.