Sprinkler
The landlord requests by text
that one of the tenants reset
the timer, as the creeping bentgrass
grows most thirsty on June afternoons.
Outside, the houses retreat beyond
their walls of bluebeard bushes.
I try to remember who murders
whom in the folktale.
Each tangle of fescue, each dot
of starthistle dripping with moisture,
bent over as if burdened
with the weight of an idea.
On this block, there is a prohibition
on certain species of tree.
The article says that the fetish
for the lawn flourished
with the spread of empire.
I wash my hands in it,
the perfect spray of the rotors
littering the sidewalk with their mist.
The rainbow it conjures is only water
shredding the sunlight into pieces.
First Person Meditation in a Distinct Landscape
6:30 A.M.
Because I am beginning on time today,
the first sentence of a lecture
on the death drive.
I am listening, with intention,
to the birds. The ki-ki-ki
of the yellow-shafted northern flicker.
Statement & illustration. The key,
supposedly, to the structure
of a day, a lyric poem.
The morning slowly blues
with the incursion of sunlight.
There are children opening
their eyes in small rooms.
If I could draw, I would draw
them with a purple crayon.
9:15 A.M.
We ascend, carefully, one foot
in front of the other,
up through the switchbacks
and down into the depression
where we find the alpine lake
some say is the relic
of the last ice age. To sit
in the water and send the mind
down through the caverns
of geologic time: what is that? Inflows,
diurnal breezes. The second century.
The year of the five emperors.
Still, water accrued as a body. We are dropped,
endlessly, into it. It is cold.
Cold enough to stop the seconds.
12:25 P.M.
For lunch, a salad
where we foreground
the leek, the mild flavor
of its bundle of broad
leaf sheaths paired
with a nightshade,
something that has spent
its life underground.
We live in the historical
district, surrounded
on all sides by wolf spiders
& the steady rhythm
of irrigation systems.
It is a kind of weather,
the economy. In good time,
one of us will venture
downtown to clock in
for the remainder of
the afternoon, screening
visitors as they walk into
a building whose financial
interests remain unclear.
But first, the salad.
Free range salmon from
Alaska. Chunky blocks
of feta. Pre-packaged
radishes that leave the soil
of Bakersfield, California
all over the bottom of my sink.
3:08 P.M.
I close my eyes & imagine myself.
Wind & blood. Dollars & sunlight.
Agentic. The fact of the matter.
A rustle in the garden. A blip in space.
An ocean. A notion suffused with speech.
5:47 P.M.
I fill the last cell in the spreadsheet
with wrapped text & run the budget.
The day trends downward towards
darkness. I focus for a moment
on the digitized sand dunes
of the mojave desert that wallpaper
my desktop. There are tangerines
in a bowl on the table.
The vacuum cleaner rumbles along
the linoleum, swallowing dust.
I think of the play where two men
stand beneath a tree & wait.
Estragon: I can't go on like this.
Vladimir: That's what you think.
9:05 P.M.
Against the night sky,
the television populates
the room with color.
In the documentary,
the sculptor loses his
life’s work to the fire bombs
of a world war, creates
his own language to examine
the mysteries of mankind.
The sculptures expand across
the screen: a fist made of
dragons, a god who walks
on all fours, the mechanics
of a clock, that in a certain light,
look like explosions on the sun.
It is late. Outside, the crickets
chirp, blending with the movie’s
soundtrack. The artist falls ill.
A vital organ fails. The artwork
grows abstract, capturing the texture
of loss, the liquidity of time.
We watch it harden
in the kiln, fusing, taking
shape. It is almost finished.
Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah, where he edits Quarterly West. His debut collection of poems, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. His chapbook, Extinction Studies, is the winner of the 2023 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets, among others.