In Accelerated Silence: Poems (Jake Adam York Prize) - Softcover

Matson, Brooke

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571315152 ISBN 13: 9781571315151

Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Finalist for the 2021 Housatonic Book Award in Poetry

“The thin knife that severed your tumor,” writes Brooke Matson in these poems, “it cleaves me still.” What to do when a world is split—terribly, wholly—by grief? When the loss of the beloved undermines the most stable foundations, the most sacred spaces, of that world? What else but to interrogate the very fundamental principles themselves, all the knowns previously relied on: light, religion, physical matter, time?

Often borrowing voices and perspectives from its scientific subjects, In Accelerated Silence investigates the multidimensional nature of grief and its blurring of boundaries—between what is present and what is absent, between what is real and imagined, between the promises of science and the mysteries of human knowing, and between the pain that never ends and the world that refuses to. The grieving and the seeking go on, Matson suggests, but there comes a day when we emerge, “now strong enough / to venture out of doors, thin // and swathed in a robe,” only to find it has continued “full and flourishing and larger than before.”

Sensual and devastating, In Accelerated Silence—selected by Mark Doty as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—creates an unforgettable portrait of loss full of urgency and heartache and philosophical daring.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brooke Matson is the author of one previous collection of poems, The Moons. Her poems have most recently appeared in TAYO, Potomac Review, and Prairie Schooner, and have been selected for anthologies such as Towers & Dungeons and Railtown Almanac. She is also a book artist and a recipient of an Artist Trust Grant for Artist Projects and a Centrum residency. She currently resides in Spokane, Washington, where she is the executive director of Spark Central, a nonprofit dedicated to igniting creativity.

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The Law of the Conservation of Mass

i. Big Bang

Maybe there was a word―
a short, single-syllable that fell
like a long-traveled drop

of rain and shuddered
a seed of light
into a flock of starlings,

wildfires of wings.
How long until matter
clotted like drops of mercury

into planets and moons and stars
into a pulse
and a brain that believed?

ii. Trinity Test Site The bright plume
that blossomed from the ground was a voice

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.

***

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 aquarium tank. I’ve been

that desperate lately, willing to break
delicate things for hunger’s sake, like the ivory
dishes that recall the years

before I met you. How satisfying to split
the discs against the patio concrete, to abandon
carloads of furnishings at the Goodwill on the corner

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 ribbons 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, glowing the shade
of persimmons. If I could have plucked you
like a mussel from your shell,

I would have swallowed you whole.

***

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 India at the speed
of light. A woman

wrapped in the landscape
uses the tip of her finger to mark
your brow with vermilion

as if something entered there. As if
something escaped. She turns
to steam as the train leans

on a curve, leans into sweet grass, 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. The red lips

chew their way through the loam.
They open. They have things to say.

There is a 0.01% probability
you are a great blue whale in the Pacific Ocean
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 to that sound, cold
in a strange bed, thinking
she heard your voice.

***

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, unskilled 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 restaurant tables

and the clinking of glasses glitter
like newly born stars. The corner booth
of our first shared smile

waits heavy with wine, bold as a planet
charting its arc in darkness. The entire house
is ours―it is always ours.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Milkweed Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1571315152
• ISBN 13: 9781571315151
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 88
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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