In another life, I am a voice for hire. Nightsin a blanketed back room I give you names,side effects, animals, hours, kinks,colors, formulas, phonemes in tonepermutations from even to enthusiastic.(I would like to talk to you about dolorous,a word no one has ever asked me to produce.)Frost. I pass houses full of opera playing out.You could identify this rustle in the leaves.Between rainfall and ten thousand monarchsin a forest, thawed and taking flight,you would know the difference.(Know: I mean you would commit the processof knowing. Recognition. Knowing again.)I try not to imagine the uses for my voice.Instead I wonder when I say bluewhich version the listener imagines:cerulean slate sky soft baby.Which hexadecimal you call up.(There is a smell to morning, oppositeto the lights always coming on.)One day they run out of patience, or soundsfor me to make. You, voice clone, beginto synthesize my speech. Unsupervised.How uncomplaining your architecture,requiring only power.(Consolation: the room was leaking anyhow,sirens breaking through.)Tell me your instinct toward prayer.Tell me how to figure home. Tell mewhere to search when the call comesin our own voice: someone has takena four-day-old baby, butterfly on her back.
Deep Learning
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“Deep Learning” from THE ALCESTIS MACHINE: by Carolyn Oliver.
Published by Acre Books October 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Carolyn Oliver.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre, 2024); Inside the Storm I Want toTouch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry; and three chapbooks, including, most recently, Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023), which was selected for the Rane Arroyo Series. Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, she now lives in Massachusetts.
Cincinnati, Ohio
University of Cincinnati
Inspired by the Greek myth of Alcestis, this poetry collection brings to life myriad voices who venture beyond the known world and exist between realities.
In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”
Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”
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