From “This Household of Earthly Nature; An Essay”
the moon’s rose madder in composite image: capture
photons from the upper atmosphere, gather all the images
together, aggregate raw data analyzed into a single instance, come,
fovea and nerve cell and ganglion, fold over on yourself, awake—
it will be a celebration
“worldmaking is a territorializing process” someone posts on the internet.
“deep down in the bible-black vents” writes Nick Lane in his book about the
biochemistry origins of metabolic processes
I am trying to tell you something about the architecture of time
I am trying to understand something about the structure of the shared universe
I am trying to build a nest, in our minds, together
out of everything, all together. as if we could bear that,
poet.
that it is a universe to all but a multiverse to each
or the opposite, I don’t know, vice versa? I have to go
sweep my small corner of the universe, the dogs track in
so much dirt, I have to make breakfast, two or three eggs on toast.
the shining fats, the protein strands, the sugars, the yeasts, the sun
streaming in at an angle now, the music of the spheres is getting louder—
the sound of a distant chainsaw, laughter, maybe where you are,
traffic, or birds, or construction, or wind down the canyons of avenues
honking horns, sirens, a TV in the next room, the sound
of someone cooking, someone playing an instrument, vibrations
in the molecules of air, the radio playing Bach or Megan Thee Stallion
or Marketplace Morning Report
and the constant new hum of electricity coursing through wires,
leaking its bracts and tendrils into the effusive livingrooms and countertops of our
incandescing time
isn’t there some oscillating connection between a cycle and a trajectory?
this is the calendar of the future, sailing outward, this is how a battery works
all cycles are rituals
your tracking number will be provided
think of every chicken egg on earth, right now. palm-sized
fruit, or cell, or orbit. there is a way
the present can cannibalize the future,
the Pleiades come up in the power-line cut, now
my mother emails me “my credit cards
aren’t working, please bake me a cake
with a metal file in it” and
“the hawks are migrating, again!”
ants are a game played by chemicals
humans are a game played by myth
supply-chain disruptions “uncoiled”
humans are a game played by markets
caterpillar tractor, Texas instruments, Boeing signed a deal for
8,000 more machinists and aerospace engineers, the GDP
contracted again, this rocky birth, weird chrysalis, phase-converter, please,
algorithm, know me, show me to myself again, to each other, give—
“weaker global activity…” “lowered demand for grapes”
“what the actual price of raisins is right now in Tokyo” “speaking
of apples” “to dust we shall return”
sunlight and sugar: atoms and the void
dimensional time: to live inside
for thine is the kingdom, the phyla, the glory
for thine is the order, the genius, the species
don’t mess this thing up for us, us apes of kinship and grief
at the corner of online shopping and heaven
at the corner of the combustion engine and All-Life-On-Earth
under this wide swath of infinitely expanding universe, bless
New-Babel, New-Uruk, New-Arkadelphia, New-Gate
of-All-Nations, New- Moon-Landing, New-Rain-on-Genetically
Modified-Wheat, New-Blessings, New-Cyanobacteria-crusting-on-the-small-rocks,
small crustaceans exploring the chromatic topography of our shared mind, let us go
out and ask of it, the World.
let us go out and ask of it, the world which is hard and made of a hard materia,
electron-repulsion of negatively charged particles which is all you have ever touched,
neck, body of a lover, table, rock, the space between where atoms sing to the void,
soprano, acapella, queen-of-the-night, king-of-the-road, master-of-puppets, come
back to me, world, work of our hands—
Copyright © 2023 by Cody-Rose Clevidence. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 9, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This is a section from a longer poem which I am thinking of as a kind of conceptual net or weaving between my mind. There is this peculiar thing about being alive at this moment, hoping for a sort of collective shared consciousness of the now but from all our different places and vantage points about knowledge and physics and civilizations.”
—Cody-Rose Clevidence