Collage is a mystic’s medium.—Charles Simic

Place two violins in opposite corners of a large,
high-ceilinged room. Leave one of them
unattended. On the other, play an E#. The other
too will tone an E#.

This is your
communion.

*

This morning there is fog, or rain that, from this
distance, oscillates, coupling the atmosphere—

— the motion
of one
metronome
affects the
motion of the
metronomes
around it.

Cumulus as pendulums, and my daughter’s
eyelids, barely clasped, as pendulums. She swings
closed her fists, startles toward surrender—

—Surrender
comes from to
relinquish, to give
back. To deliver.

The length of her—infinite at this hour.

How willingly
light takes the
name given it.

The observer—in
this light you’ll
find me
kneeling.

*

The word symphony, from the Greek symphonia
or symphōnos, means “agreement or concord
of sound,” “a concert of vocal or
instrumental music,” and “harmonious.”

In theory,
symphony was
used, in late
Greek, for
consonance.

And the
triptych
structure,
because
there’s always
structure: a
fast
movement, a
slow
movement, a
fast
movement.

*

Having pulled the jade from the pot—the roots
like your hair and the blanket that covers you.

The average
male lion
ejaculates
thirty times a
day while
mating, but
the intercourse
lasts only a
moment each
time. Thank
god, says my
wife.

Clouds are backlit when something fails
to fill them: altitude, reflection, water, light.

There’s
nothing so
selfish as
sleep.

The fade of months like all plants have roots,
like I read my Gnostics at recess.

These
intrusions
don’t bother
me.

Holy creatures and wheels: the difficulty of
gladdening. Nothing’s written in blood, really—
this pot that’s faced the window all winter has
faded from earth-tone to the-wonder-creeping-
behind-me, and for a long time you’ve confided
in me.

Then your
arms around
my shoulders,
a coffee mug
in your dirtied
hands to ease
our wait for
the
lengthening of
days.

*

She tells me she lost her leg in an accident, her
tongue in a keyhole. A dream, she says.

Mirrors aren’t
vain; they’re
(re)visionary.

At the corner gas station a local MC gives away
mix-tapes and sells hand-rolled cigars. He asks
what I do. I tell him I’m a professor, a writer, a
poet—

—it’s always a
deductive
answer that
gets me there,
to poet. He
says, Mista poet,
brotha poet,
this’ll get ya so
high your wings’ll
burn, Icarus!

I dream I’m
flying, the lake
below and the
tree-lines:
studded green
rivulets,
narrow wisps
of extended
dry-bay—the
Army  Corps
of Engineers
lowers the lake
every spring—
and off-shoots
of forest.

She dreams she birthed a puddle, a scarf knit of
silk and driftwood. She draws flowers on the
back of her hand like a grade-schooler, colored
ink for the blooms, black for the stems, and tells
me, I’ll trace a pattern now, stem to petal and around,
petal back to leaf.

She sways into
night’s ark.
She sways into
an attic, her
miles throated:
the unseen
and bed-
sheets.

What does it
mean when
you stab your
wife in your
sleep and
don’t wake up
yet jolt easily
when you
dream of
croutons and
taxidermy?

Yesterday I ran over a turtle. The tire stuttered,
then dropped—the resetting of a dislocated
joint. The reverberation through the car made
my wife gasp, say, oh my god, and I just shook my
head, couldn’t believe the noise escaping my
mouth.

*

There’s something about the deck at twilight: the
mosquitoes just visible in the half-shadows—

 

—their buzz,
their pitch
slightly lower
now as the
drummed
moon creeps
above the tree-
line.

I want to take
up archery,
hunt like my
red-blooded
ancestors, or
just feel the
tension in my
fingers as I
pull back,

take aim, and
let the arrow
go to the bats
hanging on the
power lines,
tucked against
the fir trees,

their black, their peared bodies, their silence.

*

Snow piles up outside the kitchen window.

Feta cheese.
Cucumber,
sliced thinly.
Olive oil. Pita.
Get on a
plane.  Visit
me. From
France, Italy,
New Mexico.

A lover
warned me
once to be
more patient.

I emailed my doctor this morning. My left ankle
swells at night.  Doesn’t throb though.
Ibuprofen. Some water. Lukewarm. I might
have married once if not for bells and cellos and
leashes.  And affairs.

There’s
something lost
in the
transcription
of beauty.
Trust.
Champagne.

The average
person shrugs
forty times a
day.
Let’s travel.

Everything turns up straw. How much I want
you. How much a boat. How much a box, a
mouth.

A tongue-tied
jester.

How much I eat when I close my eyes. How
much you are gone now and I’m not. How
much bread I really need. A blue pillow where I
rest my head.

At night.

And in the
morning I
think how I’ll
sell my blood
to pay the
rent, how I’ll
pull my hair
and trade it to
the wind.

*

 

I knew a girl who closed her eyes every time she
heard a car horn, drew koi on the knees of her
jeans, knew what it meant to be anonymous in a
crowd, and now I close my eyes, step into the street—

—a reflection
of the people
who’ve walked
here before
me—

—and know that koi—

 

—a
homophone
for love—

—can live two-hundred years, but I can’t
manage long without a window,

the patterns of
streets and
corners when
every city has
its perfect
hour: moment
before the
light changes,
moment we
don’t know
ourselves from
those orange
or white or
blue fish:

the sorrow we
feel over
traffic.

The shadows when we clench our eyes match
our ground-shadows pushing forward home.

*

Watched a man search for Atlantis off the coast
of Anna Maria Island: thigh-deep in the surf, he
waded only yards from my umbrella, chanting,
“It’s here, it’s here, you know. I found it
in ‘66 before my tour.” And when he came
ashore naked with his metal detector, he
muttered, “Damn things don’t work well in the
water.”

 

I met this
same man last
year on a
different
beach, except
that time he
stopped me
mid-
backstroke
through the
breakers to ask
if I’d seen his
wife. He
squinted
through the
sun, his waist
visible above
his sagging
trunks, their
pockets full of
something that
kept his
fingers busy:

shells, sand,
room keys,
loose change.
“If you see
her, tell her I
lost her.”

It starts like a joke, one I may have written
myself, but I’m not much of a traveler, and the
last time I was in Death Valley was the last time
I was in Death Valley, and while there, the
Sailing Stones:

rocks that
move across
the dry lake
beds, tracks
behind them
as if being
pushed, but
there are no
footprints that
point to a
culprit—

 

—instead the
wind and
atmospheric
oddities take
blame for
moving the
man-sized
rocks
hundreds of
feet until,
eventually,
they are wind-
blown to sand.

The man: “How much for an acre here?”

 

“I’m not sure
this land’s sold
that way.”

 

“In my last
lifetime, I was
reincarnated in
this surf, right
off Bean Point
there. I was a
sand-dollar,
a tarpon, a stone
crab,
something
predatory.”

 

Every time I go swimming, every time.

*

We drive on County A until it becomes County
Z until it becomes County B, and like the
Wisconsin highways themselves—

—their
roadside
forests, cheese
huts and brat
stops, and
level, rarely
traveled back
roads—

—we sink into
a complacency
that slows
everything
down, that
spins our radio
dial to jazz,
softer,
unhurried, and
then she’s in
front of us, a
great doe,
stooped,
unsure.

 

Everything is
silent is
perfect is
again.

We’re still in our seats, the engine idling. She
doesn’t flinch, waxen, opossumed on four legs. I
want to remember her forever.

 

A car horn behind us, and then she pistons her
legs and her head in flight while her body—

 

—her body—

 

—seems to ride on one eternal level, carries the
horizon beside it, and she’s gone and we’re left
with talk radio, a sleeping baby, our held breaths
to the moon if we could just remember our
names.

*

 

Noisemakers
next door, and
the neighborhood
dogs erupt.

Sleep comes
tender, a
rainbow: the
air is for ideas.

Pre-dawn thirst and laughter as we pull the
windows closed and crawl back nude under the
covers. This is before the welcoming.

When I
thought of
children, I
thought of tall,
thin-legged
birds, bells on
their bedroom
doorknobs to
keep them
from shutting
Mom out and
Boyfriend in.

When I think
of children
now, I think
of a whispered
hour, the
earliest light
and the latest
dark, the flake
of cradle-cap,
the cooing of
twilight’s
hillside.

On the highway this morning, a man stepped in
front of a semi. He flew gracefully—

—his arms
tucked to his
sides, his legs
rigid—

—like a bowling pin, as if his spirit, clutching
faith and prayer, left his body untethered, no
time for a proper separation. And in the end—

—the very
ushering of
grace—

—a worship, a litany: all the feeling I’d ever
need. When he hit the ground, the semi’s brakes
broke the morning’s dark, the highway was loud
again with the wind, with the stretched orange of
almost-dawn, and people parked their cars where
they were and got out, stunned by the silence,
the flattened and unnamable defeat.

*

Divinity trims
the shrubs.
There had
been clouds
above the
house.

 

Look at the
sun sweep the
deck as your
knees take
shape.

The strawberries peek through the holes in their
pot, not yet red but green like immature blades
of grass, and the sawgrass, thick enough to cut
thumbs, shadows the bottom of the basil bush.

 

You scar easily. When you tried to cut open a
rock to see what was inside—it was more rock.

 

When you
whittled a
stick with a
straight
razor—

 

 

—the birch-
boat white of
bone.

When you lay on your back tossing a baseball
toward the ceiling. You swallowed blood in the
dark, counted to twenty slowly to still the sting.

Between you
the waiting for
mornings.

The neighbor starts his edger, pulls the cord two,
three, four times until it comes to life. He
waves. You nod back and kneel curbside, tend to
the snapdragons at the base of the mailbox:

your hands
become red
with clay. You
become, hands
sculpting dirt,
watering,
removing dead
petals, the
small ear into
which God
can complain,

 

or something
less impactful,
something
more like here
is where your
guardian
appears,

 

so you hold on, close your eyes, and you have to
tell yourself every time that scars don’t itch.

*

Heat lightning
through the
magnolias—
trees are
ninety percent
air. The flash
back-lights the
vines crawling
the gazebo.

A detached
spider web on
this still night
floats by the
force of the
spotlight
under it alone.

Something calls or screeches or mates or dies. A
bird or an insect: I can’t tell. It’s what I mistrust
most about the South.

 

On every street corner, a church. A man in a
suit, a tie tight round his neck, a bead of sweat.

Oh Glory
Glory Glory,
Hallelujah!

No parking but in the grass. In the pews, we
speak two keys for the same map: danger,
flowers blooming backwards, empty nights of
calm petals in our palms.

 

Music. The
fierce hours of
new
obsession.

 

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ABOUT “SYMPHONY: A (RE)PHRASING”:

“Symphony: A (Re)Phrasing” started as an experiment in the truest sense of the word. I simply wanted to know what I could create given zero limitations. The result is a collage, an essai (from the French, “an attempt”), a long poem, an inquiry. I’d been teaching an advanced poetry workshop here at Belmont University, and we’d been talking about Sandburg’s quote: poetry is “the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” It got me thinking. Why not make something that uncategorizable? I’d been reading the work of Ander Monson and T Fleischmann and Carole Maso, essayists who push form and structure, and I wanted to try my hand at doing the same.Combine hyacinths, biscuits, a dash of experimental indulgence, and excerpts from my notebooks. Stir profusely.

---

Gary L. McDowell is the author of five collections of poetry, including, most recently, Mysteries in a World that Thinks There Are None (Burnside Review Press, 2016), winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Press Book Award, and Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014). He’s also the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Gulf Coast. He lives in Nashville, TN with his family where he’s an assistant professor of English at Belmont University.