"Short Song" and One Other Poem by Nathaniel Mackey

"So spoke the / A string, rubbed and let / go"

Giovanni Battista Bracelli, 1624, from Bizzarie di Varie Figure

Short Song

  —andoumboulou 379½—


  I dreamt we kissed after
    a three-year prelude,
a three-year plague. “Let
                                               the
    angels argue,” I woke
      up shouting, odd for me
  to say… All it was was
                                             against
      as such, an asynoptic
  recycling filed high and ris-
    ing. Wind chimes were
                                                 traps 
      I got up knowing, a kiss
  no longer only a kiss. All
    was all but itself I stepped
out of bed knowing, the
                                              long
    work of having arrived
hardly begun… An octet a-
  waiting the end of time 
                                               we
      the eight-limbed beast
  of two backs had been
    the night before, me and
                                                   she
  who lay asleep still, the
    soul of it all it seemed, all
so all but itself, an aliquant 
                                                    book
  of so

---

After Mat Maneri’s “Dust”

    —“mu” 357½—


The viola’s muted squeal
    tugged at my collar, 
  the dog I was revealed,
                                              rev-
    elated, no going back,
no further disguise. So
  to say or what to say of
                                               life,
      so much of it preparing
  for life… So spoke the
    A string, rubbed and let
                                                  go, 
  rubbed and filling the air
    with coarse potions and pow-
ders, misbegotten angels of
                                                     dust, 
    angles of address. So spoke 
      speaking itself, a chill encase-
ment mediation made available,
  a voice in arrears of itself, an
                                                          owed
    encyclical… It bled a kind
of dust blood, a retributive
  spirit world hemorrhaging
                                                     the
      way light so uncatchably
  sat. A new papal récit was its
    analogue of late, for what
                                                     rea-
  son neither it nor I could
    say… It was all a kind of
coming home to roost. A
                                               ma-
    nipulable maw next to
      not human made andoum-
  boulouous the we we were
                                                     but
    would not
  be 


        ____________________


  All because the two mu-
    sics waved at each other
passing by, one without
                                              words,
    one without instruments,
      two musics even were
  ink or lead and paper called
                                                        in-
      struments, two musics two
  even so… Each was a sing-
    ing of strokes and scratches, a
haptic emporium what one or
                                                          the
    other would admit, all and
      only what, long known but
                                                          not
    let in

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Born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, a Californian most of his life, and a resident of Durham, North Carolina, since 2010, Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and editor. He has published numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently By Bent Light (Bodily, 2025), Birds Anonymous (Verge, 2023) and Double Trio (New Directions, 2021), a boxed set of three books: Tej Bet, So’s Notice and Nerve Church.

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