The Comoving Distance of the Peach in Cosmological Equations

(listen) "beyond the world’s widening eye, is the grooved pit of it all..."

The Comoving Distance of the Peach in Cosmological Equations

Circling down in a tightening gyre,
the crow charts its course
to the silver orchard,
pencil trees
in perfect parallels
until the horizon, where,
anarchy! Lines meet, centers fold,
Euclid rolls gravely and wads
the chaos of glooming arithmetic
into a confused ball. Look
to the farmer. Her twilight fingers plot
a new geometry as they trace
across the paperbark.
Here, soil is x and fruit is y,
and we solve for no endpoint but infinity.
Beneath each callus lies the spiral formula of creation.
Beneath the bark, spiritus mundi pumps sap heavenward
to where peach blossoms unfurl luscious truths,
and there, my firm friend, past the pluck,
past the fuzz, flesh, nectar, and pleasure,
turning and turning, beyond the world’s
widening eye, is the grooved pit of it all,
intricate as your brilliant brain.
The stony core of its center
holds the key. Press
it to your ear
and hear it
lover-whisper,
be sweet.
Be sweet.

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Matt Layne writes…

Every step of the process of publishing Miracle Strip proved to be a journey of discovery.  The spoken word aspect of poetry has been important to me ever since my first poetry gig in Birmingham, Alabama in the early 1990s with The Nappy Crow Feather Medicine Show (this pre-dated Old Crow Medicine Show by at least 4 years). Dennis Hunt, a local Birmingham artist, put together the show with dancers, visual artists, chanting monks, spinning aerial artists, and poets in an old warehouse on Birmingham's Southside to create an evening that made me want to create bigger and bolder poetry experiences. Ever since then, when I embark on a new project, I strive to imbue them with multi-sensory experiences. For me, when all the arts whirl together, improvisation and wonder dance in perfect union. I love the ecstatic unexpected bubbling up of joy of witnessing and participating in such happenings. So when I began to work on the Miracle Strip manuscript, I knew I wanted it to be more than just static words on a page. The first question to answer was how to make that happen. 

It took me a few weeks of rumination to strike upon QR codes as my vehicle to marry sound to the page. I dislike the hard brutalism of the shape of QR codes, so I toyed with creating more ornate codes, but ultimately, my publisher, Keith Badowski, and I decided to add our own ornamentation around the square of the code. Next, came the recordings. 

I downloaded the freeware audio recording app, Audacity, and I queried my Kevorkian Skull Poet comrade, Ned Mudd, about utilizing his music as backing for the poems. Ned graciously agreed, and as I went through the process, he shared new tracks with me to marry with different poems. I set my laptop up on my dining room table, loaded up one of Ned's tracks, and I made my first recording. I couldn't believe how great it sounded! Shortly, thereafter, I loaded the track onto a flash drive and took it out to play in my car. I couldn't believe how awful it sounded! There was so much ambient noise that I didn't pick up while listening through the laptop: refrigerator, lights, air-conditioning, ohms upon ohms upon ohms. After the purchase of a somewhat better microphone, it was into the closet with me and my laptop. I spent months attempting to get the right feel for each of the pieces in the collection. 

I next uploaded the completed works to Bandcamp where I was able to export it as a music player onto my personal website mattlaynepoetry.com.  I set up an individual webpage for each poem, so the first audio piece was something like mattlaynepoetry.com/kindling. I then manufactured a QR code for that web address, and it worked beautifully except I noticed that each piece played directly into the other, so I went back and uploaded each poem as its own distinctive album on bandcamp to prevent this, and I reformatted the website, and it worked perfectly. Each track played on its own, and then I had one master track that played the entire collection. Incidentally, if you scan the code on the back cover of the book, it will play this master track of the entire collection of poetry. The next task was to sample each of the QR codes to make sure they functioned correctly. First track: "Kindling" - check. Second track: "The Comoving Distance of the Peach in Cosmological Equations" - fail. It scanned fine when it was big and on my computer screen, but on the page, it just would not take. It took me weeks before I realized that with every character I typed to transform the web address into a QR code made it a more intricate symbol, so when I typed in mattlaynepoetry.com/thecomovingdistanceofthepeachincosmologicalequations it made a little square blob of black that no phone could read. I went back and changed all of my web pages to numbers, and the rest is history.

All this is to say, that I am so happy to have discovered new ways of connecting with readers, and I am so happy that you get to read this poem, and I hope you enjoy many a peach as we move from the time of peach blossoms into the fruits of summer, and I hope every bite is sweet and delicious as you are.

P.S. I just received word that Miracle Strip was named Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society! Life and peaches are sweet, y'all!

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“The Comoving Distance of the Peach in Cosmological Equations” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us. 

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is in print! Get your copy today!

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Poet, librarian, raconteur Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. A founding member of the 1990s improvisational poetry collective, The Kevorkian Skull poets, Layne believes in the radical transformative power found in the intersection of poetry and art, and he wants you to write your truth and share it out loud. A multiple Hackney Award winning writer, he has also been recognized by the National Society of Arts and Letters and been featured in Peek Magazine, Birmingham Arts Journal, Steel Toe Review, B-Metro, and elsewhere. Look for him at your local library.

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