Black Aperture

Poems

Matt Rasmussen

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780807150887
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In his moving debut collection, Matt Rasmussen faces the tragedy of his brother's suicide, refusing to focus on the expected pathos, blurring the edge between grief and humor. In "Outgoing, " the speaker erases his brother's answering machine message to save his family from "the shame of dead you / answering calls." In other poems, once-ordinary objects become dreamlike. A buried light bulb blooms downward, "a flower / of smoldering filaments." A refrigerator holds an evening landscape, "a tinfoil lake, " "vegetables / dying in the crisper." Destructive and redemptive, Black Aperture opens to the complicated entanglements of mourning: damage and healing, sorrow and laughter, and torment balanced with moments of relief.

III

OUTGOING

Our answering machine still played your message,
and on the day you died Dad asked me to replace it.

I was chosen to save us the shame of dead you
answering calls. Hello, I have just shot myself.

To leave a message for me, call hell. The clear cassette
lay inside the white machine like a tiny patient

being monitored or a miniature glass briefcase
protecting the scroll of lost voices. Everything barely

mattered and then no longer did. I pressed record
and laid my voice over yours, muting it forever

and even now. I’m sorry we are not here, I began.

LAND O’ LAKES

A tinfoil lake rattles the sun
as a canoe crosses it

approaching my shore.
The Native American girl

walks toward me, kneels,
offers a golden box of butter,

and then she’s on the box
I am holding.

Apparently, I’ve accepted.
Come, she says, we will

burn beauty into something
even more mesmeric.

It is evening inside
the refrigerator.

I lie down shivering
near the lake.

The giant red ring
hovers behind her,

generating warmth.
You must fall asleep

in your dream to wake up
in your life, she says.

I can hear the vegetables
dying in the crisper

and through the door,
the television weeping

openly, unashamed.

A POEM IN WHICH LEAVES AGAIN FIGURE PROMINENTLY

I fall asleep, waking to find
a poem in which leaves

figure prominently. If you
tear all of the skin away

leaving only the veins,
they are miniature trees,

the poem says.
I nod off as it describes

snow falling, warm as living skin.
The poem is right though,

warm snow would be nice
to lie down and sleep in.

This leaf is orange,
my dream last night—poorly lit.

Yet the snow falling though it
was whiter than real snow,

which isn’t really white at all
but the rejection of light before

it melts into puddles the color
of whatever hovers above.

BURIAL

I buried a light bulb
in the garden and a flower

of smoldering filaments
bloomed downward,

toward you. Grief comes
like patient lava

I always easily outrun
while our past becomes blank

as an empty parking lot.
You have been dead half

of my life, and yet you sit
at the kitchen table

in my apartment
with a prescription bottle

full of bullets, reading
the directions aloud:

Do not take on an empty stomach.
Take one capsule every 24 hours.

Side effects may include...
You look up at me

and rub your eyes,
but I’m not there.

APERTURE

Opposite of closure,
a suicide’s grave

never grows over.
My imagination carves

each memory of you
smaller and smaller

into dust. The fall after
you murdered you,

I burned your letter
in a mound of leaves

on our lawn.
Blackened grass,

stairwell of ash,
a greener door

grows there now
but not in me.

THE MOON

floats like a document
without a single word.
When it slips under

the horizon’s desk
we are left
with the definition

of unilluminated.
Sight gives way
to the sound

of two clouds
colliding, breaking
each other apart.

What m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Acknowledgment