Consciousness

BY JOANIE MACKOWSKI

"How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander

the halls of the skull with the fluorescents

softly flickering. It rests on the head

like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel

and awkward as soon as one stops to look.

That pile of fallen leaves drifting from

the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove,

to the grooves in that man’s voice

as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves

of books with moonlit opossums

and Chevrolets easing down the roads

of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single

tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet

itself is a swarm, a pulse with no

indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo.

Our compacted galaxy, its constellations

trembling like flies caught in a spider web,

until we die, and then the flies

buzz away—while another accidental

coherence counts to three to pass the time

or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine

strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped

in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself

like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds

a fraying map from the pocket of the day."

Source: Poetry (February 2012).