BY AMIE WHITTEMORE
First Transmission from the Indestructible Observer
Brevity & clarity, that’s what
they taught us to start with—location,
temperament, observation. But what
can I report that translates
into vowels, consonants, into 1s & 0s,
into sound or light or magnetism? Brevity
is gone from me. Clarity is one with
obscurity now. Opposites have collapsed
into themselves & viewpoints
are debatable: the me that was isn’t
anymore though remnants of memory
cling like entangled particles—Someone’s
hair poured over my face. Someone’s voice
like goldenrod & aster, like struck match.
Milk poured over cereal, honeyed spoon,
Mother’s knuckles stoic as eroding stone—
this is a transmission of one kind
of self to another—or it’s not.
This is a transmission of desire, which I’ve come
to believe is all the universe is—vectors
upon vectors aiming for a horizon,
fat & golden, restless & unbearable,
the thing we call unimaginable though
it glistens along our nerves
like hypothesis, like chill.
The Indestructible Observer Remembers Sleep
Like a missed button
on a shirt I can’t re-button
because I’m not wearing
anything, clothing & sleep
matters of the past
like almost everything
in my life, if life this is,
this never not nothing
zippered between present
& past like an abstract painting,
a bad joke, an unsolvable riddle—
better to recite lists
of vegetables in alphabetical order,
sing every song from Rubber Soul,
to recall the moon was a ghostly
galleon tossed upon cloudy seas—
& the highwayman kept riding
& Bess kept plaiting
a love-knot into her long black hair,
& doom kept mounting
in the vastness, the dark vastness
of that poem glued to me
though I haven’t recited it
in decades—if decades
there are—I don’t even like it
anymore, only the nostalgia
of memorizing poetry, the way
it sank into my muscles,
blanketed within me like sleep
though sleep itself has left me
like a lover tired of my mouth.
The Indestructible Observer Remembers Summer,
my birthday, that silly accounting,
a sequin in the vat of summer’s splendor—
balloons & cake, fanned candles,
gifts, unbearable sweetness—what
is it about summer that brings me
back to night, its vast flesh sparkling
like Someone’s laughter or Someone’s
tongue clicking, flicker of match
& sulfur, sugar & butter, candle & breath,
Someone & Me—
I didn’t think of myself as romantic
until I crossed the horizon & time
unfolded like a map & unwound itself
like the birthday song coasting free
of my loved ones’ throats, a poorly tuned
tenderness scattering into the night—
it’s not romantic, the vastness.
It feasts on whatever I provide
like summer did, as it filtered green
through green—that dear color faint,
crushed into what was once my palm.
Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.