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. Excerpted from In Accelerated Silence: Poems by Brooke Matson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
