Andrew Joron: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Andrew Joron

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Andrew Joron

Five Poems

VIOLIN VS. VOICE

Reason, the considered motion

            of thought, runs

            ahead of itself, anticipating patterns—

            so absorbing, by every alternative of No

The dark tastes of the body.

            Rippling, alive to

The play of factors, your upside-down visage

            looks like language unmasked—

            I give you voluptuous, voracious today—

& tomorrow beg

You not to enter the archive

            of such acts, such signless touches.

Only maintain

            here the literal, that state of

            unstated need.

One hand in, one hand out

Until the collection is clean.

REVERSE PORTRAITURE

I’m “I am”

—the nude

            sitting sideways, deflected in space—

            All too soon

            I become self-conscious.

Trapped in blood, I yell my head off

            in a million ways, most

            converging on my voice.

Later, without permission, I plan to step out of the frame.

I’ll walk a corridor of simple meanings

—half ghost, half guest—advancing well into

             my mortal series, my extension into points . . .

At the last

I expect to find that, evicted

            of conviction

Light rests easy on the world.

RECOUNT ONE ENCOUNTER

For forever, you, or “you”

            failed to complete a sentence

Without the rest of language swarming over it.

In discourse, in the antiquity of all devices, now

            does we shy away from you?

—the symptom of a law applied to itself.

            Dissolving swims with the current.

Defer, instead to

            stars pour through the throats of utterance.

To hear their on

            & on in dark daylight (sound delayed, sound delight).

To arrive at not (the knot) & never—

You, again & against—you, a gain on gone, gone on.

SACRED SUBSTITUTION

Sin, sin, synonym—

            words, a correspondence of swords.

Then, at origin, sound before light—

            sigh’s size

Or the rise & fall of a perfect vowel.

Blessure of the real: defeat

            of the senses.

Only through curvature does thought achieve its end.

            As if, as in.

Even in oblivion, to believe there is

            witness, vast unto vanishing—

            This mark must stand in its place.

JOTTED IN HASTE

—but I hesitate to start.

The universe is purposeless, so all the more exploratory.

Language renounces body, even in the midst of song.

Language announces only from far away.

One absence, many absences. Between equals, absolutely.

Who’s counting? Too few and too many.

The form of forms, same as formless. Ensouled, entangled.

Say this thing, this thing right here, is where infinity ends.

Call what calls you Logos.

Accession/excision, ruby-red romantic.

“Every mirror shows the same face: the death-mask of Narcissus”

—there it is, my most famous line.

Author Bio:

Andrew Joron is a poet, essayist, and speculative fiction writer. His poetry collections include The Absolute Letter (Flood Editions (2017), Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010), The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008), Fathom (Black Square Editions, 2003), and The Removes (Hard Press, 1999). His work of speculative fiction, O0, was published by Black Square Editions in 2022. The Cry at Zero, a selection of his prose poems and critical essays, was published by Counterpath Press in 2007. From the German, he has translated the Literary Essays of Marxist-Utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch (Stanford University Press, 1998) and The Perpetual Motion Machine by the proto-Dada fantasist Paul Scheerbart (Wakefield Press, 2011). As a musician, Joron plays the theremin in various experimental and free-jazz ensembles. Joron teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.