Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1948 and raised in California. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Stanford. Mackey is the author of two chapbooks of verse, Four for Trane (1978) and Septet for the End of Time (1983). His first full-length collection of poems, Eroding Witness (1985), was selected by Michael S. Harper for the National Poetry Series; his second collection, School of Udhra, was published in 1993.
Also an essayist, critic, editor, and prose writer, Mackey has since childhood explored literature’s analogies with music. His poetry, paying particular homage to the equation of myth with music in black cultures, is exploratory, ornate, and ambitious. In 1993 Mackey coedited an anthology, Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose, and released a collection of essays, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. At present he teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
For Olivier Messiaen
I wake up dreaming I’m forty years in
back of the times, hear talk of a
Bright Star converging on Egypt.
This on day
two of this my thirty-fifth year,
forty years out in front that I
even hear of it at all …
fallings away of the ground, such obstructions
like a cello with one string gone.
An avalanche of
light. An old out-of-tune upright, some of
whose keys keep getting stuck …
A creaking door makes me dream of colors,
caught up in whose warp a knotted
stick
leaned on by the sun …
A war camp quartet for the end of time
heard with ears whose time has yet to
begin …
An unlikely music I hear makes a world
break
beyond its reach …
So I wake up handed a book
by an angel whose head has a rainbow
behind it.
I wake up holding a book announcing the
end of time.
A lullaby of wings, under-
neath whose auspices, obedient, asleep
with only one eye shut, not the
end of
the world but a bird at whose feet I hear
time
dissolve …
A free-beating fist, each tip of wing turned
inward. Battered gate of a City said to be
of the Heart.
Held me up as if to cleanse me
with fire, neither more nor less alive
than when
I wasn’t there …
for Jimi Hendrix
A black tantric
snake I dream
two days to the
morning I die
slipping up
thru my throat,
slithers out
like the vomit I’ll
be choked by
can’t, gigantic
seven-headed
snake, sticks out
one head at a
time. Must
be this hiss my
guitar’s been
rehearsing
sits me down by
searching twitch,
the scrawny
light of its
carriage, broken
sealit stark-
ness, furtive
sea of regrets.
But not re-
duced by what
I knew would not
matter, woke
to see no one
caress the arisen
wonder’s dreamt-of
thigh. Death
enters a slack
circle whispering,
slapping hands,
beauty baited
like a hook, hurt
muse at whose
feet whatever
fruit I’d give goes
abruptly bad.
Must be this
hiss my
guitar’s
they were
licking the sky.
Must be this
hiss my
guitar’s been
rehearsing, these
lizardquick tongues
like they
were licking
the sky.
Down on my
knees testing
notes with
my teeth, always
knew a day’d
come I’d
put my wings out
and fly.