Tag: @MatthewOlzmann

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America

by Matthew Olzmann

—Southern Pines, NC

Tell me what it’s like to live without

curiosity, without awe. To sail

on clear water, rolling your eyes

at the kelp reefs swaying

beneath you, ignoring the flicker

of mermaid scales in the mist,

looking at the world and feeling

only boredom. To stand

on the precipice of some wild valley,

the eagles circling, a herd of caribou

booming below, and to yawn

with indifference. To discover

something primordial and holy.

To have the smell of the earth

welcome you to everywhere.

To take it all in and then,

to reach for your knife.

from Constellation RouteFind more by Matthew Olzmann at the library

Copyright © 2022 Matthew Olzman
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Matthew Olzmann

—Southern Pines, NC

I expected a God, a titan

towering above the rest of the forest. Instead,

you were only a tree.

Not a sequoia or redwood with their legendary torsos,

thick as the stone turrets of another continent’s

medieval castles. Just a regular tree.

An unusually tall and dignified tree, certainly,

but also one with a bend in the spine like a thin man with a bad back.

Fragile. Limping toward some medicated tomorrow.

You looked exhausted. And who wouldn’t?

After outliving centuries of witch trials and slave ships,

genocides and confederacies,

logging industries and men from Maryland

sent to harvest your sap for turpentine.

Four hundred sixty-eight years is a long time when,

at any given moment,

someone like me could toss

a cigarette butt from the window of a minivan.

And just like that: history

is an ash-whitened field,

a twenty-square-mile arc of unremarkable flatness

in a space where some ancient breathing things

once stood (the way I now stand), their limbs

stretching to feel the wind weave

through their fingers and branches.

from Constellation RouteFind more by Matthew Olzmann at the library

Copyright © 2022 Matthew Olzman
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Matthew Olzmann

Sometimes, when people talk about white people,

exactly one half of me hits the Eject Button.

Not being white, that half says, Okay, this thing isn’t about me

so, I’m just going to hang out over there and think about other things,

and then the other half of me tries to tag along,

looks for an exit door he too can slip through,

but the half of me that just opted out, says, No. This

is important for you to hear. You really need to sit and listen to this,

and then the other half says, No, I’m with you. We’re

the same person, and then the first one yells

something like, Not this time, Colonizer!

but that’s when I notice I’m talking aloud

and everyone’s looking at me. It’s okay

if everyone’s looking at you. It’s fine if both voices

are right. If both voices are wrong. If they’re not

talking about you but you should listen

because it’s important. If they are talking about you

but you shouldn’t listen because they’re clueless.

You might walk through many rooms.

You were welcome before you arrived.

It’s okay if what you feel is anxious.

If what you feel is calm. If what you feel is jarring.

If what you feel can best be described

as torsion pendulums, elm trees,

feeder roots, escrima sticks, algae on the surface

of water surrounding you and then letting you go.

Metaphors link the known and unknown,

the real and imaginary, and they exist

because there are things we have no words for.

It’s okay to not have words and,

in their absence, become a bridge. I didn’t care

about metaphors when I was your age.

What I cared about then was simple:

convincing my parents to let me have a dog.

That was what was important, and I felt

it was the thing that could best complete my life.

I couldn’t have a dog because my mom was allergic.

That is a trait I did not inherit from her.

That is also a metaphor. We don’t choose

what we inherit. I did not get a dog.

Instead I got a goldfish.

The goldfish was boring and died after a month

and, really, it doesn’t add much

to my narrative. This would be a better story

if I just left that part out. But that’s how stories work:

you choose what to include, what’s important,

and what belongs to you. You choose how to tell it.

The thing I would tell next

is that I later got a pet salamander. It was beautiful

and weird-looking and belonged to both

earth and water. Some salamanders are poisonous.

Some mythologies say they’re made from fire.

Some have gills. Some have lungs.

Some have neither and have evolved

to breathe forever through their skin.

from Constellation RouteFind more by Matthew Olzmann at the library

Copyright © 2022 Matthew Olzman
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Matthew Olzmann

Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,

the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations

of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction.

It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing

but benzene, mercury, the stomachs

of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.

You probably doubt that we were capable of joy,

but I assure you we were.

We still had the night sky back then,

and like our ancestors, we admired

its illuminated doodles

of scorpion outlines and upside-down ladles.

Absolutely, there were some forests left!

Absolutely, we still had some lakes!

I’m saying, it wasn’t all lead paint and sulfur dioxide.

There were bees back then, and they pollinated

a euphoria of flowers so we might

contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,

“Hey guys, what’s transcendence?”

And then all the bees were dead.

from Constellation RouteFind more by Matthew Olzmann at the library

Copyright © 2022 Matthew Olzman
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Matthew Olzmann

—After Borges

A good place to hide a drop of water is a stream.

A good place to hide a stream is beneath an ocean.

A good place to hide a man is among thousands

of men. Watch how they rush

through the city like water through a ravine.

I’ve searched many famous cities for you.

There are three listings for “Bruce Wayne”

in Houston, two in Pittsburg, one in Miami and one in LA.

In Tampa, Bruce Wayne is a retired chemistry teacher.

In Flagstaff, he drives a taxi and hopes

to procure a diamond for his soon-to-be fiancée.

A good place to hide a star is a galaxy.

A good place to hide a galaxy is a universe.

Look at the night sky. Justice

used to be a cowl and cape, the flicker

of wings under an etiolated moon. And you,

like a gargoyle, crouched atop some stone edifice.

To conceal a universe, place it in a multiverse—that hypothetical

klatch of alternate realities. The dilemma of the word

“alternate” is how it implies a norm, a progenitor stream

from which the alternate diverges. Which is the alternate?

Which is right here, right now? There is no such thing

as Gotham City, but here is Gotham City and I’ve been

so naïve: believing the truth of the old mythologies.

How they promised a recognizable villain,

a clown with a ruby-slashed mouth, a lunatic’s laugh.

In the universe where I exist, supervillains

look like everyone else. Give them an old flannel

to wear and a square jawline to smile at the world.

They’re hanging noose in a middle school bathroom.

They’re shouting, Get out of my country,

from the window of a passing car.

They’re pulling a pistol in a crowded barroom,

or bus stop, or the middle of the street.

They could be anyone. They could be everywhere.

A good place to hide a sociopath is a full-length mirror.

A good place to hide that mirror is the heart of America.

In the battle of Good versus Evil, I was so sure

Good would win. Now I just hope something Good will survive,

get a job cutting hair or selling cars, make it home for dinner.

I suspect there’s a parallel dimension where you, Vigilante,

long for this as well. To have a normal life is victory enough.

To remain anonymous and not be spat upon on the subway.

In Boston, Bruce Wayne owns a pawn shop.

In Milwaukee, he plays pinochle and feeds stray cats.

In New Hampshire, he goes fly fishing on the Sugar River,

reels in one brook trout after another.

When he removes the hook from a mouth,

he might place the fish in a cooler.

Or, he might set it back into a stream—

the alternate or the original—no longer certain

in which he stands.

from Constellation RouteFind more by Matthew Olzmann at the library

Copyright © 2022 Matthew Olzman
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Matthew Olzmann

We know gears are supposed to turn,

but we forget their teeth, that to pull

they must bite into another.

Last month, the workers at the axle factory

went on strike. Without the axle,

there is no car. Without the carloads

of workers at noon, the sandwich shop

down the block shuts its doors,

kills its lights. Behind the sandwich shop,

a dumpster fills with bees.

My wife is allergic to the stinger.

Lodged in human skin, the barb is lost

to the bee, and the bee must die.

And if enough of them fail again

to find the hive, that dies as well.

from MezzaninesFind more by Matthew Olzmann at the library

Copyright © 2013 Matthew Olzmann
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Matthew Olzmann

Consider the mathematics of my German father.

The unconditional tears of my Filipino mother.

Call me Spock, but it was logic versus emotion

every day on Earth.

Out in space, there are over a million miles

between asteroids in an asteroid field.

It’s pretty much impossible to hit one unless you actually

aim for it.

Not so on Star Trek. There, they have to grit their teeth,

put their shields up, crash a couple times and assess the

damage.

As a kid, I was amazed by the skill of those spacemen,

“skill” which I soon realized was nothing more than sheer

incompetence.

Hitting an asteroid? There’s just no excuse for that.

A modest revelation. But these revelations

strung themselves together, orbited the planet

in ways that messed with things like gravity and light.

It went like this: You knew you could fly

until your first attempt left you with two broken teeth.

You knew you were like all the other kids,

until your best friend said, No, you’re not.

And he was right.

And in that moment, something shifted.

The galaxy became real, and in its realness, the asteroids

seemed so much closer than you thought.

You were half-alien, staring down an eternity

that was both limitless and dangerous

as a captain’s voice boomed from above:

Brace for impact, we’re going down.

from MezzaninesFind more by Matthew Olzmann at the library

Copyright © 2013 Matthew Olzmann
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.