IN ACCELERATED
SILENCE
IN ACCELERATED
SILENCE
poems by
BROOKE MATSON
Jake Adam York Prize Selected by Mark Doty
MILKWEED EDITIONS
© 2020, Text by Brooke Matson
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First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Matson, Brooke, author.
Title: In accelerated silence : poems / Brooke Matson.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed
Editions,
2020. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019022503 (print) | LCCN 2019022504 (ebook) | ISBN
9781571315151 (trade paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781571317353
(ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3613.A8386 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS3613.
A8386
(ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022503
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022504
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. In Accelerated Silence was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
for Ryan
There will be music despite everything.
—JACK GILBERT,
“A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE”
CONTENTS
I
Ode to Dark Matter
Elegy in the Form of a Pomegranate
The Day Before
Red Giant
Supermassive Star
Maybe
Neurosurgery
Eve Splits the Apple
Broaden the Subject
II
Law of the Conservation of Mass
Our Lady of Guadalupe
Metaphors of Mass Destruction
Psalm of the Israeli Grenade
Newton’s Apple
Prism
Elegy in the Form of an Octopus
III
Eve’s Apple
Law of Inertia
Impossible Things
Electron Cloud
Centrifugal Force
Orionid Meteor
Elegy in the Form of Endangered Species
There Is a Room in the Four Dimensions of the Space-Time Continuum
IV
Elegy in the Form of Porcelain
Sonnet in the Higgs Field
Ode to a Fractured Conch
Elegy in the Form of Steam
Metamorphosis
V
How to Eat a Pomegranate
Elegy in the Form of a Butterfly Bush
Lithium
Sonnet on a Hook
Ode to a Rotting Apple
Amaryllis
Alchemy
Ode to the Returned
Ode to the Sun
Notes
Acknowledgments
SILENCE
I
ODE TO DARK MATTER
I speed through the moonless
night—porch lights thinning
into silhouettes of trees.
Emptiness isn’t empty,
the radio scientist insists. Relieved
you’re here to hold the aching
stars apart, a muted backdrop to the howl
of headlights streaking by, I bend
the pedal to the floor.
His voice describes a mine
deep under the earth
where professors hunt the flutter
of your wings
in accelerated silence—
wait for you to slip, to exhale
into their sensitive machine, eager
to assemble your breath
in data streams. They think
you’re already theirs:
a variable to ensnare in a net sum,
the way children trust
answers to soothe.
Dear wild unknown: tow the borders
of this universe far beyond
our grasp. Whatever we see, we break—
count and dismember
all we touch:
The earth. The atom. Anatomy. Eve.
Be the animal that escapes
our love without a wound.
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF A POMEGRANATE
Eve was like that: eating a pomegranate
like smashing a chest of rubies.
She split the whole
vermilion world in a violent need to know.
My finger circles the crown, traces its tight circumference,
red and round. I pluck it from the mound
the grocer arranged and hear the question
I asked you that night, when we were just beginning
to trust each other: If I were a fruit, what would I be?
The Latin for fruit is pōmum
and some reading that Bible believed Eve
ate an apple. I hold your answer
in my hand: You are striking. Tough to crack.
Worth every effort, you said. There’s an art
to eating a pomegranate. Cut away the crown
until you see the chambers inside—six bedrooms
shining with scarlet chandeliers. In a bowl of water
use your thumbs to tear the walls apart.
I wonder if you ever ate a pomegranate
this way when alive, and if you wanted—
the way Eve wanted—to be understood, to understand,
to be freed from your flesh like a hundred supple seeds.
But this is a supermarket, not a bedroom,
and my cart is empty
and I am wavering on the scuffed linoleum
of the produce aisle, rubbing the skin of a pomegranate
as if it were your hand.
THE DAY BEFORE
the doctor called we whispered
over a white-clothed table
in my favorite restaurant, sipping ruby
bulbs of Malbec. You weren’t hungry
(a symptom, we later learned) but insisted
I order the portobello.
&nbs
p; Like magnets, our knees
locked beneath the table, a phenomenon
you loved to point out. Waiters hummed
around candles like sable bees
and evening honeyed the sills.
We’re gonna do everything right, you said,
setting down your glass and grinning—
meaning July, Seattle, meaning
two children and long retirement.
I couldn’t help it. I reached
across the tablecloth to touch the lines
at the corner of your eye.
It took you by surprise, my thumb
brushing your skin as if painting
the edge of you.
RED GIANT
the nurse slid into your vein. I tasted metal
you mused after, as if it were an experiment
not a hunt for cells intent
on your death, not an ore that could solder
your body to life. We didn’t know
technetium has a half-life
of four million years. It burns in the bellies
of red giants—stars smoldering
at the end of their lives—a highlight
before the collapse into gravity. I feel sick
you said. We agreed it must be
that terrible metal. I’ll sleep it off
you said. We didn’t know
the isotope that laced your veins
was stripped from fuel rods,
old nuclear reactors—
a chemical back-burn to fight the fire
igniting your scan, igniting your left
brain like the night sky.
It must still be there in the soil:
rust from the ribs of the stars
dividing in the rind of your skull, scissoring
one life into many.
SUPERMASSIVE STAR
Let there be—
you said, and assembled me from fusion / fire / a timer
set in motion
For every reaction an equal
opposite contraction
Don’t pretend you’re not
a part of this
You called me here
to burn
You called and I came
willingly
lit
like a birthday wish
Your auric
little miracle
Your magic machine
I clapped my hands ignited
every color until the trick
backfired /
until
one dense atom
spun in my core a thin
spider
of iron
and so began the collapse /
compacting mass / the glorious
punch
of gravity
Your word was my death
sutured within me
MAYBE
Who is the You in your poems, he asks, because it is capitalized. Do I have to know? I haven’t been to Mass since Death (capital d) entered the narrative and sent my heart palpitating with rage at nothing in particular, because who can be blamed for unexplained cancer? You need to figure it out, he says, as in dissect the pronoun. In middle school, my classmate refused to dissect a grasshopper, the exoskeleton limp on its aluminum tray. She came to class the next day with a grasshopper formed from clay, each appendage painted in immaculate rainbow colors. It glowed on the teacher’s desk, hovered above the lesson plan on its stand, a vibrant idol outsizing all the dead ones put together. I suppose that was her point. Now my point. Am I avoiding the question? Our universe may be one of many in the Multiverse (capital m)—may be as in maybe, as in somewhere on the spectrum between yes and no, one of several enigmatic answers the Magic 8 Ball we had as kids offered from its dark indigo fluid, a tiny triangular phrase bumping the window in its belly. One day ours stopped answering—something about the buoyancy, or maybe one of us just shook it too hard.
NEUROSURGERY
I’ve imagined it many times and still it jars
like a fist to the jaw. There will be music
despite everything, you quoted, and yes, my pulse
quickens, even now, at Zoë Keating’s electric
cello, enough to need tissues.
I imagine it so often, it’s as if I saw
the surgeon, swathed like a priest, drive the saw
into your skull. Like popping the seal of a mason jar,
he unhinges blood and bone, exposes the grey tissue
of his trade. The nurse presses play on our music
as instructed (cue the cello); nerves bathe in electric
oceans; the pulse
of cello strings drop like plumb lines through the pulsing
Z of the heart monitor. I believe you hear it. But that saw
haunts me—some real Frankenstein shit. Where’s the electric
bolt of lightning, you’d joke, but I can’t laugh. The jarring
raze of its serrations cleaves the music,
cleaves my tissue-
thin bravery. I have learned time is a flexible tissue
and the muscled pulse
of your neurons strums its own shining music:
our first kiss on a darkened street; the seesawing
oars of kayaks on the bay; whiskey sipped from jam jars
on the Fourth of July; fireworks glowing electric
as you rise between thighs, electrified—
years of time folded tightly in a cortex maze of tissue
where somewhere, my body wanders through synapses that jar
and flicker like Vegas highways, pulsations
of neon in contiguous, cursive constellations. Tell me sawing
stars from the sky is impossible, that music
can’t be severed from melody, the cellist from the musical
oscillations of her instrument, the wild electron
from the nucleus it loves. Say there is not a saw
for every bond. Say that our minds are not lanterns of tissue
paper, easily torn. Your pulse
holds you together a while—a fragile jar
of stars humming their music in the dark tissue
of space, an electric dance of neurons. Like hope, they pulse.
O trade me a saw for a spoon, that I may scrape the sides of that jar.
EVE SPLITS THE APPLE
We were given so much—the entire field
unbroken by boundary. The colors—
you should have seen them: black sheen
of the beetle, indigo silk of the river rippling under
the tiger’s flat tongue. What I’m trying to say
is I knew nothing of law
even as I spotted its blushing throb
fastened high, like the sun to the sky.
Or maybe that I loved its red
as I loved the pulse inside
his chest, my ear pressed to his flesh on nights
we held each other on banana leaves, his body
moving over me, moving against the rheumy
field of stars. I loved its orb, its warmth,
and its waxy shine—even as I tore it from the limb
that bore it, split the sphere
on a stone, half its sugared meat
for each of us. I didn’t know you can break
against laws. He smiled when he saw
what I’d brought, brushed my hair behind
my shoulder as he took my gift.
Even before he bit, I foresaw his jaw
fall from his white skull; the doe
slit open by the puma, her lustrous muscles
flayed against the grass;
saw the leaves departing,
scarlet, from maple trees—then
an ashen fence of rain, a flood. Even before
he swallowed. Before the sword of light
severed what lay behind.
BROADEN THE S
UBJECT
In kindergarten the teacher asked, What kind of things are red? and arms rocketed toward the ceiling with apples firetrucks roses. I raised my hand and said, Anything can be red, like a sweater or a crayon, and Mrs. Curley’s face fell and she said, No, things that are always red. But my favorite apple is yellow, I thought, the same frustration as when my friend tells me to broaden my focus, to think about moving on to another metaphor, and maybe I am a bull anchored to what hurts, charging sentences at what I cannot understand: a cluster of small hands firing into the air like flags, symbols of how the world ought to be. I ought to let it go—maybe. I return to red red red because I cannot let it go or turn my head the way most people focus on the positive—flower not blood, pomegranate not wound. Maybe I am the narrow hot line at the edge of the visible spectrum, inching toward invisible, bordering on irrelevant. Understand: anything can be red, usually when someone or something splits open.
II
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 till 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.