April Fools kicks of National Poetry Month!

So anyway, I signed up for the Academy of American Poets poem a day email for April, thinking it was going to be Wordsworth, or somesuch. I was happy to see they're going a contemporary route with it. (Poem-a-Day: A new poem in your inbox every day to celebrate National Poetry Month. Sign up for a daily dose of new work from John Ashbery, Eavan Boland, Henri Cole, Grace Schulman, Kevin Young, Carl Dennis, and many more.)

Today's poem is from Noah Eli Gordon, with a poem from A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, just published by New Issues Press.

An exact comprehension of the composer’s intent

by Noah Eli Gordon

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.