Joanie Mackowski
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—
