An Experiment in Artifice and Abject-oriented Ontology
by Noah Eli Gordon
between a prayer for the telescope
and a prayer for the microscope
pixels flare into the image of an atom
in an anthill an airplane entering
the troposphere an idea orbiting
that of human cognition in the authoritative
shape of earth seen from elsewhere
antiquating the 20th century’s
representational doubt or doubting
all representations of ownership
in our condensed book of vigilance
where the absence of a crown
shows hierarchy to have no color
I prefer the muddy ghost of one
sustained cello note over one
hundred thousand science experiments
I prefer two electrified balloons
pushing away from each other
like localized points of reference
perhaps one can love the academic sentence
for its ethical contortions the footnote
for its fishhooks pulling up islands
from an ocean floor perhaps a barge
passing below a bridge exemplifies
a green horizon free from the expectation
of green blackened with carbon completely
submerged the egg holds around it
a fine film of air it is silver the silver
of barges and the silver of bridges
a perfect pear-shaped lampshade
bringing to the room an understanding
of artifice the silver shape of Colorado
in spring its glossy parody of an ideal
landscape shattered by the airplane window
crossed-out like the X wedged into
a representation of the upper atmosphere
the sun’s light is white this is the light
of example a world within a red lampshade
whose idea of orange is a tiny dandelion
giving to a field its greenness anyone
can bend and scatter blue and violet rays
but who puts together a life by praising
mathematical air around an elephant
half of the sky excuses itself
from such a question sixty-five million
years ago an asteroid smashed into
the earth what remains is loneliness
for the nihilistic imperative withdrawn
as Copernicus withered as an oak leaf
clinging like an aura of classical inevitability
around the little effort it takes to imagine
a scorpion you don’t admire an icon you
just click on it the airplane and the
atmosphere were never one spiraling
through a pre-Mayan zero’s impossible
boundary the barge and the bridge were
never one a seed disintegrates in soil
complete potentiality comes to the elephant
and the egg one validates the other’s
annulment reaching toward the lamp
someone’s decided the world’s too full
of illumination both captain and pilot
survive scrutiny as the barge destroys
the view from the bridge and the
nomenclature of clouds gives the day
another creation myth to ignore the guts
of a piano would make a good example
but of what I’m unsure so we continue
to engineer our architectural music
taking cues from Chaucer like clues
from the hourglass shape of a Chinese
alchemist’s furnace too much symbolism
annihilates the sublimated form therefore
no one mentions swans anymore would you
rather have a goddess of terror
to whom goats are sacrificed or
the implications of Eve signifying human
sensitivity entrenched in the post-
European psyche for another millennium
I’m through thinking in images says
the bodily eye to its narrative
dismemberment while a decapitated head
rolls out of the cliché and I’ve built
another victim of fully embodied rhetoric
and in this lies the difference between
picture and proposition between
thinking afresh as if nothing had happened
and taking a tidal wave apart a salty
phoneme sinks in sand it is not
novel pictorial noise but the limits
of draftsmanship standing for the limits
of earthly existence removed from
the videocassette multi-petalled rose-like
I give you permission to see beneath
the apparent image of the flower
in this model two prongs of a fork
are pushed into a cork J’Lyn moves
from Joshua Paul and Kristin expand
without tipping or toppling over the fern
marks an absolute conclusion simplistic
and perishable impermanence yes
the gymnast considers another balancing
experiment and our boat demonstrates
a failure to parse the greenest of sentences
the fork however is easily returned
to the drawer the fern to the forest
airplane to the air and the elephant
to the twisted nucleotides that give it order
after the piano was repaired its music
seems dated derivative as attention
tossed to the ruptured balloon ruining
the experiment’s proof of repulsion
but proving sideways listening a kind
of detonation a miniature electric cell
in which notes are to noise as bees
are to a shaft of wheat compressed
into the best tasting bread things don’t
correspond they coalesce a lion crushes
a dandelion a crown crushes abstract
autonomy Dante damns his enemies
in every new translation as all true images
are collapsing again into the earth
we enter the Clouds of Magellan
only to drift like heterogeneous ideas
yoked together by violets this is
the terrible loneliness of an electron’s
orbit botany and pornography fused
into the most aerodynamic of asteroids
goodbye Hegelian aliens the rational alone
is a real hinge pulpy and puffy children
swing in summertime alive as animation
so much for the playground hypothesis
of a disaster movie ripping open
an already cauterized cultural wound
you like novels and I like nudity
underneath all utilitarian and decorative states
an instrument of epiphany sits unstrung
as a book of etiquette from the age
of cause and effect American acoustics
thrive in their theatrical qualities
while the sky drained of any significance
drops like a curtain over our embrace
of reading into the empirical now
the piano implicates us in its generous
and possessive melody the cricket emerges
an imago parents roam from room
to room demolishing themselves
like Socratic students both egg
and airplane crack leaving no other trace
than the transitory and arbitrary volume
of a little air tender wreckage
grass nailed objectively to the ground
About the Author
Noah Eli Gordon is the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions, an editor for The Volta, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press. His recent books include THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER (Ahsahta Press, 2013), THE SOURCE (Futurepoem Books, 2011), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007). More info can be found here.
Publication Rights
Poem originally published at the Boston Review. Republished here with the permission of the author.
Image
From a photogrpah by Brianna Santellan (Unsplash).
