Poetry by T.J. McLemore from our Spring 2017 issue.
Where M stands for magic, mystery, or membrane, according to taste
— Edward Witten
Even the body, so impossibly tuned and tensioned:
all of us crimped, folded and thrumming just so, they say,
like a trillion trillion guitars or glass harmonicas, tiny
symhonies of sound—so why not metaphysics? and maybe
it was a lonely voice that started it all, a single word
that set everything to spinning out in ripples, these circles
we know so well: as all water ends up in the sea, for a time,
as the planets will spiral into their star, be turned to light
(so what is death but a change of state?)—and light, set free
in time, no instrument, no body, pushes back the void, still
humming whatever this song is we all run on, and run to
Image: Cross, Henri-Edmond. “Landscape with Stars.” Ca. 1905–1908. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
