In Accelerated Silence

by Brooke Matson

  but not the dull blade

  of the body—what I crave

  Whales

  I declare to the man

  who has climbed with his wife behind me

  Where?

  he demands There I say and point

  but already it’s mist

  THERE IS A ROOM IN THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM

  where candlelight warms our winter bed

  and moon-white hips trace ellipses

  around the sun of your skin.

  There is a kitchen embedded

  in the fibers of time

  where your chest trembles

  under my hands as a soup pot rattles

  on the stove. In the dark

  theatre of space, amateur actors

  unravel Shakespeare, and as the lights

  go down I lean

  into your lips as shadows lean

  into walls. An entryway exists

  where your index finger traces

  the boundary of my jaw as I slide

  into sleep, as if to unlatch

  its gate and enter. Enter

  an entire hall—longer than a light-year—

  where our knees touch

  under tables

  and the clinking of glasses glitters

  like newly born stars. The corner booth

  of our first shared smile

  waits heavy with wine, bold as a planet

  charting its arc. The entire house

  is ours—it is always ours.

  IV

  ELEGY IN THE FORM OF PORCELAIN

  winter is a prism in reverse / colors

  reassembling into white

  snow that illumines

  the morning / kisses the dark

  needles of pine / the season

  before his death / it crusted the patio

  like porcelain from plates I split

  against it

  months later in my rage / all the delicate

  flowers arranged in jagged blue

  and alabaster triangles / a kaleidoscope

  of edges / fine powder

  lost between them / the drifting debris

  of dead stars / what I mean is

  I loved the brushstrokes

  at the corners of his eyes / little hairline

  fissures / I mean

  we are more than our breaks / what cannot

  be reconstructed from the bang

  or the plate before / spinning like a galaxy

  across the porch

  SONNET IN THE HIGGS FIELD

  I force my heft against an unseen fence

  every morning just to climb out of bed

  Each limb lead-heavy as if fighting tar

  a drag that scientists call mass and I

  call massive depression A relentless

  resistance as when skiing on the lake

  the raft flipped and I did not release the

  rope but clutched it harder felt my bones moan

  against the force of water a translucent

  field of green where trout parted like rays

  of light against my ribs and snagged the cold

  space of silence When at last I let go

  I became weightless afraid a buoyant

  breathless particle nameless on the waves

  ODE TO A FRACTURED CONCH

  You could have been home

  to a hermit crab

  when I spied you in the sand

  imagining you whole—

  inspiration for a poem

  about fractals

  I dreamt the night before

  of Mandelbrot’s prime numbers

  repeated

  in a man’s curls

  each of which represented a proportion

  of the universe

  telescoping upon

  its verb

  a golden chorus played over

  and over

  You breathe

  water in my hand

  throat

  cracked through

  salt and empty rooms

  No evidence of the voice

  I was taught to listen to as a child

  Can you hear it

  my sister insisted

  pressing the cool

  lip to my ear until I was sure

  I could

  I believed it was that easy

  to commune with the dead

  our songs

  wound within us like a spool

  of string from which

  one could reconstruct

  the chorus of our origin

  But the silence segmented

  in the stairwell

  sentence of your body

  is somehow

  expected

  as when walking among the infinite

  arms of ferns

  later this afternoon

  I will find a dead house finch

  its breast peeled

  back like a husk of corn

  ELEGY IN THE FORM OF STEAM

  The teakettle quiets before it whistles

  and in that breath I recall

  the way your hands did simple tasks

  with great intention: crushing garlic

  with the thick ball of your palm,

  stirring soup like it could be injured.

  Making the bed, you took your time

  smoothing the crease of the top sheet

  like soil over newly planted seeds.

  The weight of your hand at rest

  comforted the silver handle

  as you waited for a shrill scream

  to cloud the air, a confirmation

  of what was real. I grasp

  its slender shoulder, lift its body

  from the burner. My contents

  falter as its cry

  falls cold.

  METAMORPHOSIS

  i. Cocoon

  Your mother smoothed the paper

  of your face when she believed you were asleep,

  wandered into hospital corners to tuck

  her tears between glossy magazines.

  And now spring licks this side of the earth

  and all the rooted, leaf-winged creatures

  remember their past lives in the sun.

  Green beaks thrust through loam, yawn

  for light and dew. You begged me

  not to watch your skeleton emerge

  from your skin, having witnessed

  your father’s metamorphosis

  at only seventeen. But see

  how the soil writhes:

  a menagerie of vibrant plumes, supple stalks

  splitting into peonies.

  See how the cells of your brain become

  clouds of cottonwood seed

  adrift in the humid heat.

  ii. Luna

  More animal than insect. More mouse

  than moth.

  Abdomen long as a robin. Wings

  ragged as tissue paper.

  It crawled through the cedar shards

  of the flowerbed under the amber porch light.

  A few steps, double-back,

  and it was gone.

  I was twelve and breasts

  budded under my shirt.

  I lay awake.

  Under the blinds

  the sky beat with the color of sinew,

  the glistening shade of lip

  and tongue, the shiny intestines of the starling

  our cat left coiled

  on the doorstep. The moon slid

  higher in the frame. I knew

  there were spaces inside us

  that ache toward light.

  iii. Lacuna

  When people ask, How are you?

  my mouth fills with flannel.

  How are you doing?

  they ask, and I touch the fragile arm

  of the sugar bowl

  or rather, the hollow

  inside its porcelain elbow

  where your finger nested<
br />
  in half-formed thought.

  The teakettle howls silver

  like a wounded fox

  and sometimes I let it howl

  until the cat hides under the armchair

  because that’s when your hand

  would relieve it. I wash the rubbered skin

  of a bell pepper, cut away the spire

  of seeds that scatter

  in the sink, hollow its reddened ribs

  to a carcass

  warm enough to crawl inside.

  V

  HOW TO EAT A POMEGRANATE

  After Sarah Koenig

  Don’t think about the consequences.

  Let the primal need to know

  fill you with salt. You will carry its tight

  belly in the pocket of your coat

  for three days, embrace the weight

  of the question—a ripe confession,

  a reticent guest. I know

  you’d rather have a simple task—

  fruit with a softened peel, puckered cheek

  that yields to a dull edge.

  But that’s not why you’re here.

  If this is sacrifice, don’t dilute

  the amplitude of the act.

  One muscled blow

  will sling your skin with magenta.

  When you begin, an absence

  will open at the back of your throat

  the way an astronaut entering space feels the floor

  fall away. Don’t hesitate.

  Use your hands

  to scrape the seeds like answers

  to your tongue. You will lap

  jelly from your palms, bend your fingernails

  backward with asking. Do not be ashamed

  of the bold carpet stain—

  red, relentless proof.

  ELEGY IN THE FORM OF A BUTTERFLY BUSH

  I pared the boughs back every few months

  to keep the twigs from scraping shingles

  on the southern side of the shed. Hummingbirds

  would make their spry appearances, flit

  through sprigs of lilac, vanish

  when the shade shifted.

  The day they removed the second tumor

  from his brain, I stumbled into the garden.

  There it stood, silver-limbed and hardy

  in the noonday glare. I borrowed an axe.

  Hacked it down to an ashen foot. Snapped

  the long limbs into sticks.

  Months after the funeral, now strong enough

  to venture out of doors, thin

  and swathed in a robe, what a shock

  to see it full and flourishing and larger than before—

  hummingbirds dashing between branches

  like watercolor brushes.

  LITHIUM

  Fine like talc. The dust of doves. Faith

  you can rub between fingers.

  I know you want to believe in objectivity

  but let me tell you: your perception

  of this moment floats like a darkroom photograph

  in a wash of chemistry. Clarity

  is what you desire. The fine details. The iris

  of his eye daring into focus. I can give you clarity.

  I was the red in first fires—a restless, reactive alkali.

  When Robert Lowell slept on poets’ lawns

  and believed he could halt

  traffic with his arms, I recognized the deficiency

  in his rabid mania, his melancholia. Listen—

  happiness hinges on a fulcrum

  of salt and light. David Lovelace said, I’ve been accustomed

  to mysteries, holy and otherwise. And don’t you want

  both water and wine? Divine and human?

  Illumination by intermediary

  is still illumination. I can be that.

  I can be that for you. Lovelace also said,

  Some of us take communion or whiskey

  or poison. I lay out my wares

  and like a scattered flock of rock pigeons

  you come tottering to the bread.

  SONNET ON A HOOK

  Her white-limbed torso flails into your palm

  just like the salmon you caught as a boy—

  your first fish. The crescent moon of its hip

  beat silver on the belly of the boat,

  eyes wide and mouth agape. The tightened line

  flecked the deck with red, made you sob and beg

  to throw it back—to end those brutal oscillations.

  Now the perpetual vowel

  of her anatomy opens, slaps your palm,

  and you are hook and lure and gasping boy

  both caught and catching in a woman’s hip

  so that she bows and arcs supine, a boat

  unmoored, her jaw unhinged. Let go the line

  of where her body breaks and yours begins.

  ODE TO A ROTTING APPLE

  And it occurred to me, standing there in that bleak, cavernous space, that nobody is ever just one thing…. If the multiverse was about choices, and all possible choices were being made, then we might be all those things and everything in between.

  —A.W. HILL

  Consider yourself a red house

  containing five

  slender black doors each containing

  a different house

  in a different country

  Choose one

  Turn the knob like a period that extends

  to comma that softens the milky

  page of your ribs

  Let your bruise be passage

  to your escape / exit / entry

  Be trajectory

  gnarled little snake-root

  cracking the rim of a seed ellipsis

  at the end of the book

  Hum at a frequency

  only the dead can hear

  Let gravity hold you / unfold you

  into a thousand rooms one for each

  variety of your kind

  Recite their names remember nothing

  decides the fate of a body

  that speaks the language of infinite the lexicon

  of overcome and this is not their house

  their doors

  Utter an impossible thing unfurl green

  syllables from a new tongue

  Be multiplicity

  blossoms freed over the field

  Be Honeycrisp / Granny Smith /

  Braeburn / Gala / Ambrosia

  Construct a new stanza

  AMARYLLIS

  the amaryllis split this morning into scarlet

  tongues after I made love to him or rather

  to his ghost it’s the same now to my body

  sometimes I cry but today something shuddered

  loose inside me and my brain recited God

  from God light from light true God from true

  God and on and on the whole creed

  rushed back to me I hadn’t spoken it in years

  and only then in communion with strangers

  who filled in gaps where my lips

  stumbled here it was in its entirety

  whole beautiful verses repeating like a song

  only weeks ago the amaryllis was a tight fist

  on my windowsill absorbing the thin

  light of winter the ice is so thick

  it will never release us God from God

  light from light one plus one plus one

  does not equal three but one again after it wilts

  when I cut away the head another

  will rise in its place and another after that

  and another after that

  ALCHEMY

  since our bodies last kissed I cry

  crossing the ocean between my thighs

  it used to be enough

  to be a single woman sailing

  through her own body steady

  and determined

  but now I am rudderless<
br />
  and longing buoys me toward

  the ridged fire of the horizon

  into which gulls wheel

  and disappear—the crucible

  where sailboats melt to gold arc wide

  into the hip of evening

  what is it we carve

  into each other when the waves

  swallow us when we surface

  like survivors unclear

  whether we’ve woken in paradise

  or death the story

  necessitates we continue

  that the salt-burned body

  keeps breathing

  ODE TO THE RETURNED

  Give me the wolves that returned to the sea

  eons ago when ocean was old hat and every

  mammal was walking. Give me the sledge

  of their legs into surf, the sheet of salt

  drawn across matted fur—a lullaby

  forgotten. The slow erase of an amber iris

  for a star of obsidian, the algorithm

  of wind for the gloss of current.

  Claw for fin. Fur for skin. Give me their cold

  freedom, the period

  of sun dimming, then blotted

  by depth. Give me the wide comb

  of their bellies, throats like sieves,

  the ocean passing through them—growl

  turned to howl, turned to song.

  ODE TO THE SUN

  cracking the boughs

  of my neighbors’ pines

  with your light—

  your first appearance

  in what feels like months

  let me stand in my bathrobe

  one foot in the pantry

  the other in the kitchen and lean

  to the left

  so your fire

  finds my irises

  I want to be

  blinded so when I close

  my eyes even then

  you are with me—

  thumbprint

  on the darkness—

  NOTES

  The poems in this collection first appeared in the following publications:

  CALYX: “Elegy in the Form of Steam” (as “Tea Kettle”)

  Copper Nickel: “Amaryllis”

  Crab Creek Review: “Ode to Dark Matter,” “Lithium”

  Isthmus: “Newton’s Apple”

  Laurel Review: “Electron Cloud,” “Orionid Meteor,” “Elegy in the Form of Porcelain”

  Pacific Northwest Inlander: “Elegy in the Form of a Pomegranate” (as “Ode to a Pomegranate”)

  Permafrost: “Metamorphosis”

  Poetry Northwest: “Elegy in the Form of an Octopus” (as “Ode to Chromatophores, Ode to an Octopus”)