In Accelerated Silence Brooke Matson (epub e reader .TXT) 📖
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- Author: Brooke Matson
Book online «In Accelerated Silence Brooke Matson (epub e reader .TXT) 📖». Author Brooke Matson
crying, Stop.
When I touch your photograph
on the refrigerator, the spiral of my fingerprint
marks your cheek
like a small halo of cloud.
Life doesn’t wait, I hear you say.
Outside, the starlings sing
the afternoon to grey while lilacs
abandon their fragrance.
iii. Operating Room
The thin knife that severed your tumor—
severed you
from your body—
it cleaves me still.
Those dead scientists asked a question that killed
and we are still
dying slowly from the answer.
Microscopic cells swell like buds
of peony—swell and split
like that first flower of fire.
iv. Hiroshima
Think of a lit match—
how its head vanishes.
v. Fallout
All light was once matter
and all matter shall become light.
Evening draws me back
into this bedroom, as it did on days we woke
together, when your fingers found the sheet
and pulled it the extra inch to cover
my bare shoulder. The starlings sing
at morning and evening,
the same doorway—sing
though the hollow your hips
carved on the bed has no mass
to hold its shape. I want to be folded whole
into the light that fills your place.
OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE
In the hammock of his robes, she piles roses
like a bounty of heads—
swollen apologies
from the blue cistern of sky.
Why burden a boy with these soft bodies,
washed, like the dead, with rain?
Go, she said, and show no one. I used to keep her
on my kitchen mantel, the spangled
bloom of her body papered around the tall
glass candle, the light-filled mandorla splintering
behind her. As a teen, I had a friend who loved
his faith so much he tattooed her down
the length of his spine, nape
to hip. I watched drops of water star
the corona of her veil as he slid
from the lake at summer camp and told myself
all love was a devotion. Now roses rot
on the side of my house, withered husks
of sparrows I slap
from stems. When I learned remission
was out of reach, I hurled
the candle across the room. A vessel
was all I wanted—beatitude of wax,
axiom of I understand, I intercede, a reprieve
whispered in the dark, where our bodies weigh
as much as rose-scent. Once I massacred
a rosebush, not knowing to cut
above the bud eye,
how each limb feeds
the next like a vein, how the arms
can dry up like rivers, dammed. I slammed
that heavy candle in the trash. It sank
like a full bottle of wine.
Anticlimactic. Cliché. Not enough, I tore
her icon from the wall—the one I lacquered
onto cedar that summer
as a teen. My initials
at the bottom—who was she?
METAPHORS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
1. Cancer:
the typist’s fingers miss a key
on the invite
taking care to bend the brads
she hand-delivers
the manila
upon receipt the President
launches a missile
2. Fission:
her grandmother’s necklace snaps
at the party
freshwater pearls
riot
ricochet
roll
under the sink
down heat shafts
look you’ll never find them all
besides the string is broken
3. Grief:
a fingertip traces the rim
of an empty wineglass
until it
howls
PSALM OF THE ISRAELI GRENADE
Six hundred and thirteen seeds of a pomegranate
are six hundred and thirteen commandments
of scripture singing lead rivets
in the ribs of the enemy. I am the mitzvah arcing
through their open windows hung with thyme.
Into their lemon orchards, chartreuse heads
broken like dandelions
in a hurricane. Centuries shorn to ash
in nanoseconds—a psalm of cinders
over scored land. Each death
sends a chorus of detonations ringing
like rain on the Red Sea. The waves
pass through one another
as ghosts walk
through walls. I want to sing, Father.
Pull the ring of the pin and release me—
a red dove erupting from the cliffside, russet earth
blown heavenward on a burnt
offering of belief. Isn’t that
Your unspoken commandment? A slaughtered ram
at Rosh Hashanah: may we be head not tail.
Not the wailing. Not the carcass
carried through the streets.
But the dark sun
sailing through a kitchen window. The crack
of light lifting feet. Brow split
like a pomegranate within a kerchief.
NEWTON’S APPLE
Came to him casually, a wild syllable
of color, a ripe proposition.
Bruised on the grass, a casual reminder
of our entrance on the earth.
Anchored to field, a weight
that tipped the scale,
Eclipsed the sun, the pocket of its blushing
body burnished.
Cleaved his angular thoughts like a joke.
Weighed in the cup of his hand, a mass
of lead, of red, of laughter.
Dropped again to be sure.
Bruised again / again / again /
PRISM
i. Dissection
Morning shatters a water glass, casts
rainbows on formica.
I am not fooled. Don’t try to convince me
any of these are promises. I’ve lost
too much—his curves
immersed in earth while flowers and berries and birds
make use. What could You possibly
offer me now?
An empty glass.
A man pared
into colors. His laughter peeled
away like the skin of an apple.
ii. Black
Priests wear black to tell their flock, I am already dead
and therefore cannot die.
We should all wear black—not only
for mourning. Ashes every day
as protest.
Obsidian that shoulders the quiet
story of fire.
Black like outer space—
the balance of probability between her hips.
I say her because like Eve she does not
obey the law.
She eats whatever she likes.
iii. Death
The prism we pass through.
The nameless blade
that strips us to wavelengths.
Narrow bridge we cross
into the body of another.
iv. White
The science teacher crossed three spotlights on the wall:
green, blue, and red.
My hypothesis was grey. Others
said purple, surely. Or brown.
He darkened the room, slid
each over the other: a triangle of pristine white
light
where they collected.
Explain this, he said.
Not one of us could.
v. Wake
Can light break
or does it, like water, extend
into ocean, conform
to its container, swallow all assaults, never shatter
no matter how many stones
you throw?
vi. Electromagnetic field
I didn’t intend to end up here.
I didn’t mean to go beyond
black and white, our beginning
and his ending, beyond the fence of the visible
spectrum. I find myself wandering, like Hertz and Ritter,
into sound and temperature—other
means of communication.
vii. Others
slide through us:
ossified X-rays drift like smoke, the husks
of broken bones. Infrared waves
slither over summer streets. Ultraviolets
singe skin while gammas punch holes
in every cell they find.
They, too, believe in their solitude.
They, too, try to notch
a word into the world.
viii. Waves
It was never my intention to return to the beginning.
Never
to return to this field—
to the bright spring day that followed
his departure. It was here—
right here I trod a path through the tall grass.
It rippled like an ocean
in every direction—hemmed together
where my body passed through.
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF AN OCTOPUS
I gasp when her body ripples from rust
to silver. Her tentacles fumble the mussel
at the edge of the tank. I’ve been
that desperate lately, willing to break
delicate things for hunger’s sake, like the ivory
dishes that
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