Read the introduction by guest editor Paisley Rekdal.
Epic
After I died, I remembered the jar
of money, big and crammed with leafy
greens, buried in the backyard beside
the dog asleep in the sun, a bumblebee
buzzing about her head then
off like a pulse down the inflamed
throat of a magnolia blossom.
I crouched in the throat
of the infinite, and my form's spent
pocket huddled under the casket's
satin lid, the loose change of my rages
and doldrums floating free
in the waves of nothing, learning new
currency. Mourners trod about the lawn,
pinching little plastic cups of wine
with plates of lobster salad on romaine
like rhododendron blossoms, women's
heels sinking into the mud, all
talking zeros and ones, recombinant
genes, a wadded cocktail napkin
with a smear of lipstick dropped
onto the lawn remotely to kiss
the earth goodbye, while time
unclenched and space dug deeper.
Confusion
We ease into the ooze. After spinning ourselves
in circles, our names spiral in our skulls like
buzzards over the fields: we hope they don't
find us and tear us apart! Was it all those years
driving north in the southbound lane, years blurred
from drams of pinks and blues to quiet
the highest waves of our inner Pacific? Back
when darkness perched on the face, before
the firmament bloomed a fermata, the first
isolated ah-ha, we eased into our original urge:
a beakful of green sprig; a true equilibrium,
"perfect internal disorder"; our anonymous and
numinous threshold of repose. We'd prefer
it continue forever: we'd empty that old ocean
of ratiocination, always measuring how many
times it contained the Other, always buttressing
another lighthouse. Our vision is fusion: a ferry between
two reasonable ecstasies; a baptism in primordial
brine; a coupling. O, how we love such effervescent
panic, this Copernicus who unmoors us from
our regal center, making planets, satellites, and now
slide across the vast like coins on a dashboard!
Definition
As the staghorn beetle with calipers
growing from the bony plate of its head,
nestled among the leaves of the staghorn
sumac raising its concentrated flames as if
to set the sky on fire: I shall pluck you with
the jaws of my brain. As if to focus on you
smears me out of focus: my aperture
narrows and my apogee widens toward
the horizontal eightball. You will never pry
my cold dead fingers from this
vanishing point. Who would
roll a strand of suns against
the teeth to know it's real? To heave
the universe through a lexical birth
canal one Italy at a time, circling quarry
amid the lake's upended sky?
Cells Speaking
You, on the line between a storm
and a fingerprint. Taking the view
from atop the five hills of your brain as
atop the seven hills of Rome, you ease
out your hours, a lily pad afloat
on us, on 100 trillion nanograms
of anonymity. Your skin
laps the shore of your bones, eroding
the difference. If your brain could glide
from your skull and into
that mud puddle as a cloud eases from
horizon to swan adrift
on the pond, would you feel so
particular? Might you take the stumbling path
toward concentric consciousness, you
a composite swan afloat on 100 trillion
nanograms of composite swans? Clinging
to the rocks, you're a critical yet
articulate mass, hour after hour of errant
coffee cups and broken eyeglasses,
the bracken of your tasseled
nerves, saucers of blood, a see-saw
reciprocity of oxygens, carbons, pots
and pans full of snow and the mindless
crochet of dna: still clinging,
you're an animate grave
slipping under waves of data: a swarm
of zeroes cohered to gaze
at the hornbeams waving their gypsy
moth larvae and serrate leaves
out the window while crows pluck and
flock like a massive black
amoeba. Does it hurt not to feel
so particular? To revel in this that
ravels you—grave flux flecks the surface
of your goings out and comings in;
you're the gleam in our eye, the reflection
swimming face down on the oblivious
pool where bright orange carp sway
such capable O-mouths about
some mosquito larvae, engulfing and blurring
amid the blare of all this breathing.
Epic
When I came alive in the crosshairs
of my parents' lovemaking, an egg and sperm
comingling one June evening in 1962,
prisoners escaped from Alcatraz island.
Into their beds they put decoy heads
made of soap, toilet paper, and real hair,
so the guards wouldn't notice they'd gone.
The first grains of my spine's island chain
uncoiled from the deep, and the prisoners
crawled through the ventilation shaft
and onto the roof, then down and through
the scotch broom and ice plant to the rubber raft
they'd stashed at the shore; they took turns
inflating, huffing and puffing, before they
disappeared inside the waves' cold rooms
in the San Francisco Bay. Months later,
my father bent to speak to me through
the stretched skin of my mother's belly.
He jingled the vodka and ice in his glass.
I hunched beneath the rafters of my mother's ribs
while a siren swelled in the distance,
then more sirens, a flock swirling and calling.
Song
I built a constellation from my bones,
strung it up like laundry,
and evening hauled it over the tar-black pines.
And now my constellation veers, a swarm of stars
useless for navigation;
with no Polaris to guide you and your dozing
shipmates toward a new island of honey.
I concentrated my constellation,
wedged its wasp nest above the beam
of the moon and its backdrop swollen
with gods and dogs: with hardly room
for a new pattern of going.
Others extend like mouths or snakes
about Orion's ankles. But my
constellation fills the sky with its axe,
and each night it chops a dipper into fuel
to feed its own brute fire.
It will chop more, will level
that prickly forest of far.
When my constellation veers,
even the sun recoils from its luster.
Music
do
Not exactly an organism, it distends
its moss on the air, overtaking
the brain, growing on us. Probing our ears
with its antennae, it intervenes;
we adopt its philosophy, as
the horizon compels us to read
the hillside's daubs of green according
to the logic of its retreating gray stave. Aphids,
asteroids, danger: all spelled themselves
merely before music rose its tide
beneath the barnacled hull of our day's
craft, gliding our cargo of flotsam
re
into harbor. An otherness
trembles into us
to test our pulses, a communal
endo-skeleton, a lubricant
for the consciousness, a house
we wear in our ribs—while a marching
band dopplers more caterpillar
verdure down the street out
the window, and the outlandish
reverberations of muscular stereophonic
thingajobs retromegafitted into
the lemon-colored truck that
mi
just drove by—music grows
the anterior pair of eyes, the brave
luminescence granted the worm
to thrive in the cave. Is it a parasite:
a flea leaping through the fur
of our attention, bullying the neurons
with relentless partiality,
useless precision, a hair's breadth
between twenty-twenty and bull's-
eye, each of us an anonymous
submarine volcano here solely
to gestate in our ears this species
fa
of locomotion. When you press
your ears together, what do you hear?
"As the propagation of the species
depends on constant conflicts
and periodic acts of reconciliation":
impassioned arpeggios make demands
on us: with or without us,
music evolves. We and some repeating
patterns of sound currently enjoy
a periodic act of reconciliation:
the ozone swells as our wriggling
heads rush toward it; our heads
so
swell, inseminated on a grassy
crescendo; sensation ravels
the notochord into its telescope
of bone, and heaven clicks
into place. Watch a rooster convulse
his morning bombardment
of kocaree: his eyes go glassy, the throat
distends; music is
a spasm. Do you feel it, too? Music
unshells us, unskins, each
a composite of the other; we sing,
and our predator finds us, jaws
la
splayed to the perfect
circumference of our skull, and
it's time for the encore: Rare free wheeler,
thumb-size terror, O pinch of terror
that intensifies pleasure, risk
at the dusky core of am, gratuitous
announcement: the orchestra bends
its collective back to the notes, heaves
the day's sun to the half-measure
rest that hovers like a hawk beyond
the telephone wires, fading into
the first tendrils of the string section, a band
ti
of cirrus, floating our crafts on a high
sea of raging noise that yearns
to be danceable: noise sometimes
becomes music when it repeats. When—
just there, as the chickadee, a checkered
path of flight toward the tree
out the window, repeats its
tow ta wee, counterpointing the notes
of the aria singing in the shower.
This organized excess, a failure
to refrain from originality, setting our
pulses in concert like a roomful
do
of clocks: we'd like to make ourselves
clear but there's something intriguing
about this impediment-to-con-
versation-making-shout, that is
conversation but rarely answers
our question, another swan song tapping
our fingers beyond our grasp. The late
spring snow falling out the window
repeats but it isn't music, and they say each
snowflake differs, what stubborn
cacophony at the heart of cold; it looks
like static on the radio when we close—
Joanie Mackowski's collections of poems are The Zoo (2002) and View from a Temporary Window (2010). A professor at Cornell University, she has worked as a French translator, a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a juggler. She is the winner of the 2003 Kate Tufts Discovery award, and the 2008 Writer Magazine / Emily Dickinson award. Mackowski lives in Upstate New York.