Rhapsody
—or rhubarb? Scant difference between some flowers and the heads of cauliflowers the fingers get herbaceous rubbing against. If I could get ecstatic I would by the low soft weeds, the hard oracular orifices of tree bark. Some landscapes under duress predict this atonal sky. Scant difference between flowers. The canned cool metal slightly curves, of trash receptacles, meadow interregna, strange fanciful flights, toward toward. Where the rhubarb field is not so bright red as you would think, not so precise or fulminating, too much green sticks out, stems and leaves like a fuzz of voices, watery incarnadine, here where the sounds so simplify the milieu into that wetness there, here I stumble to approximate the durations of others, to appear of the same time as though of space, I worry terribly, I hesitate, I lose my measure, a juice trickles down my side, रस ರಸ. Like I get I’m out of tune.
Credit
Copyright © 2018 by Aditi Machado. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 19, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem
“Oddly enough, ‘Rhapsody’ began as an essay for a class on prosody taught by Graham Foust. Now there is a series of poems with the same title, all dealing with sound and landscape. I seem to have been especially intrigued by moments when language slips into sounding like ‘just music,’ or ‘pure,’ or ‘noise,’ while remaining attentive to the anxiety-laden artifact of accent. It may be useful to know that रस and ರಸ are, respectively, the Hindi and Kannada words for juice. Both sound a bit like rust without the t.”
—Aditi Machado
Date Published
11/19/2018