Aditi Machado, Material Witness

 

now you’re in the middle of the thing
beset by its obvious & lush features

mysterious garment draped across a low tree
you sniff its bouquet, it is an odor that goes
beyond description

who left this here & what do you remember
of persons, your hand going against the surface
tension ferns & false nasturtiums as you bend

to pick an arrant briar, your whole leg as tho
a bending filament, creepy tendrils spurting thru
the accursed growth of thyself

there are some prehistoric truths here
but where (“NOW”)

The third full-length poetry title from poet, translator and essayist Aditi Machado, following Some Beheadings (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Emporium (2020) [see my review of such here], as well as the chapbook-essay The End (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) [see my review of such here], is Material Witness (Nightboat Books, 2024), a collection set in six sections: “Material Witness,” “What Use,” “Bent Record,” “Concerning Matters Culinary,” “Feeling Transcripts from the Outpost” and “NOW.” Machado’s poems have a lush quality, but with an adornment that provides no wasted space. With poems set as extended sequences of stand-alone sections, her poems have a remarkable ability to expand and contract, furthering a dense, honed language across great distances. “To step into it,” she writes, to open the poem “FEELING TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE OUTPOST,” “time being / funnily sequenced or accruing // laterally: a botany tyranny / is moss, is how listening // dithers at the drum and I / follow it out to the fence. // There is a system to regress / in November.”

She writes on history, motion, starlight; she writes around and through subjects with charged lyrics, providing an electrical current even along the most direct sentences, as the lengthy sequence “NOW” includes: “inner time rises to meet the peach / you place your lips against // green rays shoot out // it’s only a pain & a pain’s a / direction dislocatedly pointing to / what’s pleasure & when // & where are you, pacific infant / that isn’t heart land [.]” Composed as what appear as direct statements, the quality of lyric emerges through the accumulation, allowing a nuance of sound pattern and rhythm to flow through the ongoingness, one step following further upon another. Listen to the underlay of rhythm and sound in the opening/title sequence, as she writes:

Then there was no motion.
Then it picked up again, the ‘always already etcetera’ rejects.
Your stamina of compost.
It was like things deferred their freedom to you. No.
It was their kinetic enchantments.
Haunted in an old mining town turning private investment.
Haunted in its distinct odor of data, the labored sound of its pipes.
In the absence of culture. In the reduction and juice of it. You spat on the
      inklings of flowers.
Death to suburbia and you began to think again, militantly aroused resident
      alien of every which nowhere.