from “This Household of Earthly Nature; An Essay”

the moon’s rose madder in composite image: capture 
photons from the upper atmosphere, gather all the images  
together, aggregate raw data analyzed into a single instance, come,
fovea and nerve cell and ganglion, fold over on yourself, awake—
it will be a celebration 

“worldmaking is a territorializing process” someone posts on the internet.
“deep down in the bible-black vents” writes Nick Lane in his book about the
biochemistry origins of metabolic processes  

I am trying to tell you something about the architecture of time
I am trying to understand something about the structure of the shared universe 

I am trying to build a nest, in our minds, together 
out of everything, all together. as if we could bear that, 
poet.  

that it is a universe to all but a multiverse to each 
or the opposite, I don’t know, vice versa? I have to go 

sweep my small corner of the universe, the dogs track in 
so much dirt, I have to make breakfast, two or three eggs on toast.  

the shining fats, the protein strands, the sugars, the yeasts, the sun
streaming in at an angle now, the music of the spheres is getting louder— 

the sound of a distant chainsaw, laughter, maybe where you are,
traffic, or birds, or construction, or wind down the canyons of avenues 

honking horns, sirens, a TV in the next room, the sound  
of someone cooking, someone playing an instrument, vibrations 

in the molecules of air, the radio playing Bach or Megan Thee Stallion
or Marketplace Morning Report 

and the constant new hum of electricity coursing through wires,
leaking its bracts and tendrils into the effusive livingrooms and countertops of our
incandescing time  

isn’t there some oscillating connection between a cycle and a trajectory?
this is the calendar of the future, sailing outward, this is how a battery works 

all cycles are rituals 
your tracking number will be provided 

think of every chicken egg on earth, right now. palm-sized 
fruit, or cell, or orbit. there is a way

the present can cannibalize the future, 
the Pleiades come up in the power-line cut, now 

my mother emails me “my credit cards  
aren’t working, please bake me a cake  

with a metal file in it” and  
“the hawks are migrating, again!”  

ants are a game played by chemicals 
humans are a game played by myth 

supply-chain disruptions “uncoiled” 
humans are a game played by markets 

caterpillar tractor, Texas instruments, Boeing signed a deal for 
8,000 more machinists and aerospace engineers, the GDP 

contracted again, this rocky birth, weird chrysalis, phase-converter, please,
algorithm, know me, show me to myself again, to each other, give— 

“weaker global activity…” “lowered demand for grapes”  
“what the actual price of raisins is right now in Tokyo” “speaking
of apples” “to dust we shall return” 

sunlight and sugar: atoms and the void 
dimensional time: to live inside 

for thine is the kingdom, the phyla, the glory 
for thine is the order, the genius, the species 

don’t mess this thing up for us, us apes of kinship and grief 
at the corner of online shopping and heaven 

at the corner of the combustion engine and All-Life-On-Earth 
under this wide swath of infinitely expanding universe, bless 

New-Babel, New-Uruk, New-Arkadelphia, New-Gate 
of-All-Nations, New- Moon-Landing, New-Rain-on-Genetically 

Modified-Wheat, New-Blessings, New-Cyanobacteria-crusting-on-the-small-rocks,
small crustaceans exploring the chromatic topography of our shared mind, let us go
out and ask of it, the World.  

let us go out and ask of it, the world which is hard and made of a hard materia,
electron-repulsion of negatively charged particles which is all you have ever touched,  

neck, body of a lover, table, rock, the space between where atoms sing to the void,
soprano, acapella, queen-of-the-night, king-of-the-road, master-of-puppets, come
back to me, world, work of our hands—

Copyright © 2023 by Cody-Rose Clevidence. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 9, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“This is a section from a longer poem which I am thinking of as a kind of conceptual net or weaving between my mind. There is this peculiar thing about being alive at this moment, hoping for a sort of collective shared consciousness of the now but from all our different places and vantage points about knowledge and physics and civilizations.”
—Cody-Rose Clevidence