Noah Gordon

from Landscape with Cartographer's Notebook

Your report ended, "So far I've spent eleven hours looking for a call number and learned that bark is in no way equivalent to skin." I'd write an homage to Sterling A. Brown if I knew anything about the blues, I penciled in the margin, a retort to your idea of taping over a few of the holes before holding a flute in the wind. "Only seven miles left," you said, handing me the book composed entirely of jacket-copy, convinced we'd written it together.

 

 

 

You couldn't understand why I'd decided to paste the letter, the one written in blue ink over a section of the map detailing the topography of our internal river, onto my bedroom wall. Perhaps it was because they kept pushing my bowl just out of reach. Your quote about the death of Romanticism was scrolling across the bottom of the screen. A cult of beauty is nearer our reliance on clocks, at least that's what I meant to say when the wind picked up and the sound of the leaves crowned out the words appearing as you spoke them, your lips locked in some perverted pantomime.

 

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