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
before we met. How satisfying to split
the discs against patio concrete, to abandon
carloads of furnishings at Goodwill
and imagine my grief tucked in the bags.
Strong emotions cause her to change color
the biologist explains as she transfigures
into a knot of red caught on a twig,
a deflated balloon in a breeze. An octopus
is smarter than a house cat. Her eye
flicks in my direction, every cell hinged
on listening. No exoskeleton means vulnerability.
I press a hand to the glass and her ruddy skin
peppers with white the way my neck
felt like rain each time you grazed it. She heaves
her body over her quarry like a paper lantern
set over a flame. If I could have plucked you
like a mussel from your shell
I would have swallowed you whole.
III
EVE’S APPLE
Became soft, browned flesh—eucharist
dissolved on a tongue where it
Dropped
Bruised among the leaves.
Gnawed by badgers.
Drunk by moths.
Succumbed to hordes of ants ascending in the night.
Filed to a spire of seeds, the rind bending
toward the field.
Illuminated under the crescent moon,
a slender skull
with five narrow eyes.
Tempted away from shape—
Leaned toward sugar, toward myth.
Imprinted on the field, an indented
cup of scent—the urgent press
of her question.
LAW OF INERTIA
A pair of sandals suspended near the front door, the same that walked beside him on the shore, their gold straps worn to grey. Call them artifacts of a woman who died. I’ve left my body far behind since the funeral. Their haphazard stance spells tragedy, waiting for hands to arrive that might cradle them like relics—reverent and ridiculous as this woman here, unable to bury the year-old bag of rice in the garbage pail because his thick fingers once pressed the seal, or to sell the couch where our shoulders and thighs etched the polyester-linen blend. How comfortable we both declared the cushions and how holy it seems now—the padded springs still insist on his shape.
IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
It is impossible to spontaneously create quark from vacuum, but yet it happens all the time.
—DR. MACIEJ LEWICKI
There is an 83.2% probability
webs of mycelium have eaten
your nerve endings
and detritus curls like leaves
in the nest of your aorta. You lie
beside your father, twenty years
and two feet of earth
between. Mary comes every Sunday
to lay flowers and say three words for me.
There is an 11.4% probability
you sit beside your father
outside the dimension of time. He taps
a pipe on his bottom teeth,
takes a pull. Galaxies emerge
from his exhale. Black holes hover
about his head, the bold scent
of tobacco. What is the nature of darkness?
Am I unborn? The words form
but cannot escape before
he opens a book. Thin sheets of scripture
fan in frothy waves of the sea, whales
cascading between his fingers. He grins
and you fall in, your sea-grey
eyes open wide.
There is a 3.6% probability
your body escaped by train, a torn
one-way ticket in your breast pocket.
The carriage rocks
back and forth, bullets over the gold-
green tapestry of countryside at the speed
of light. Your godmother
uses the tip of her finger to mark
your brow with vermilion
as if something entered there. As if
something escaped. You turn
to steam as the train leans
on a curve, leans
into sweetgrass, jasmine,
colors that vanish as you think their names.
There is a 1.79% probability
your blood has given birth to begonias
everywhere it fell: in the woods where you scraped
your knee as a boy, behind the football field
where your mouth tasted his knuckles,
along the dock where ropes cut lines
in your palms. Red lips
chew their way through loam.
They open. They have things to say.
There is a 0.01% probability
you are a great blue whale in the Pacific
culling a seam of morning krill.
You swallow a barrelful, pulse
your larynx like a drum,
surge skyward.
Near the coast of Washington,
a woman wakes, cold
in a strange bed, thinking
she heard your voice.
ELECTRON CLOUD
You tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry.
—ALBERT CAMUS
You could be anywhere—
after all, the hummingbird’s wings
flutter so fast only
a flute of emerald
hovers among the trumpet vines
Even the waspish leaves
hum
like tuning forks
All matter orbits what it adores
*
Think of the blades of a fan—
how they cease
to be blades
and where they escaped
a ring
*
Your palm presses
between my breasts as I unbend
from sleep my blood
begs like ravens
but the bedroom I wake to is empty—
no—
filled with light but the point is
you were here you
could be anywhere
*
Some days I pause by the rotary phone
to spin the letters of your name
winding back time
in the hum and clack
of the wheel—reeling you in
letter
by letter
Never mind
that it’s not plugged in
I swear to god some days
I hear a crackling on the other end
like the time you called from the hospital
still unable to speak
I stood barefoot on the linoleum
listening to you breathe
even then
I believed
CENTRIFUGAL FORCE
I wait for the fabric
to break—
for a hole to yawn
through the skin—
but paper-thin it spins
and spins the chef’s
hardened hands
have tossed this dough
for years the disc
flutters above
and around him
a Dalí clock falling
and rising with every brush
of his knuckles let no one tell you
grief is a stone
it is supple a plane
beyond moan
stretched past the edge
of the known—
ORIONID METEOR
What you call a shower,
I call fire. I’ve come
this close—
ice and dust and desire
serrated against your cornea.
Friction is a terrible thing.
Trying to touch your face is like singing
as you’re burned at the stake—
a colorful prayer
of conversion—
a flaying
just to glimpse your back.
Your catatonic blue. God-iris
almost in focus. A cold ocean to slake
my incinerating question.
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF ENDANGERED SPECIES
We believe in the seen and unseen—
in blue whales beneath the Strait of Juan de Fuca
gliding like cellos
through silver arteries of salmon
I believed the motel owner who told
of whitecapped waves and a cliff
whales lifting their weight
from water
and before that a forest
with strange forms of animal
shades of wing
skins I’d never seen
I’ve come looking for proof
of what I cannot touch your body
for instance
I felt it next to me
last night in that strange bed rolled
onto your shoulder
wishful
and necessary thinking
But the rainforest I tread this morning
is thick with silence—
sunlight muted by spruce
Evidence found thus far:
stained glass of gossamer
sans spider
hovel of a rubber boa but not the slash
of its sentence
At last
after the slick boards of a bridge
I stand on the wingtip
of the map scanning the bright
horizon
Spouts rise like smoke
but not the dull blade
of the body—what I crave
Whales
I declare to the man
who has
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