barbara carlson

To My Office Manager, from Gregor

You couldn’t see what I was cut from,
the stranded things that filled my day: a flicker of the tram along the wall, clouds moving toward oblivion. How long had I sat at my desk figuring without realizing I had been taken by those who had long buried their unknown parts. Maybe that’s why Kafka made me an insect without a name, a shadowy creature hidden in a room without a lamp or map. And what you created in your blindness was someone I couldn’t find in myself. Maybe it’s best to have a shell inscribed with memories and hungers, even if they have nowhere to go— For after everyone leaves, and your family shuts the door, an inexplicable wind takes you into the radiance of all that is buried.

Melville Responds to Supersymmetry

I do believe we shimmer when the particles collide— How the earth must seek its distant spark while the brain eats out the heart. (My thoughts like Ahab’s truth hath no confines.) We wander the waves as cannibals and saints, our tattoos and scars mapped from a cosmos we’ll never solve, but such mysteries take us to the core of what we are: particles with shadow ones unknown to us, sister souls spinning at a frequency we can’t detect, Bartleby’s gloom and Pip’s vision interred in the waves we unwittingly cast that will drown us into a different form. Our photons stream through solar maelstroms. Even the whale’s inviolate boom and wake’s a hologram in space as all of us orphans on a universal raft of dark matter, some vast and imperceptible solitude that has no tongue.

Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of poetry collections Once in Every Language (Kelsay Books, 2017) and Fire Road (Dream Horse Press, 2013. She serves as Poetry in Translation Editor for Solstice and teaches in Boston.