Poetry / Garrett J. Brown
:: Zenith ::
As the demand for home audio systems grew in the 1950s and 1960s,
Zenith expanded its product line to include stereo consoles.
These were large, furniture-like cabinets that typically housed
a radio tuner, a turntable for vinyl records, and sometimes a tape deck. —Stereoconsole.com 1. ARK Remove the gilded idols struck in bowling stride & the dreamhouse where a loose Barbie arm rattles among boardgame dice on the lam, jellied bracelet still hooped around her drinking-straw wrist. Slide back the varnished lid, inhale wood hot-wired warm, & taste the trickling metal as the frictionless bass slides, rattles your ribs, electrifies every arm hair. The ancients claimed god would topple any sky-spiked spindle, but we know the diamond stylus is surgical. Precise. Can be dusted clean with a kiss, can prick your fingerprint’s groove—lick frets from the friction & scratch. 2. LOGO The zee sizzled under my finger, lightning stitched into the twill weave grill, as if for one bulb-popping moment it illuminated a future skyway jammed with flying Chevrolets where robot shoulders slink cold & chrome, & we’re all enslaved by eyes shortwave blue, copper lashes sparking, fluttering. But the truth inside: a spindle jutting like a tower from the grooved platter’s rim, the azimuth’s curve measured in degrees, spin in rpms. In Old English a record only circled in the skull & the scop carried the word, mnemonics gripping the bolt of god. Geometrically, you carry your zenith with you. 3. APOGEE Burnout—thrusters sputter & it’s high tide on vestibular shores, cilia submerged weightless & you’re free falling where the hawk drifts hollow-boned & clouds but a dampness in your beard while ground control ticks the seconds your bones will stretch between velvet oceans, & a not-quite-night blue & for a moment you’re convinced your momentum must surely exceed the greedy tug of this sickle, this metal crescent world. 4. CAMELOT Perhaps it would have been better to go out under the inevitable mushroom cloud Chubby Checkering at the fallout shelter sock hop, brains abuzz with century-old Twinkies & waiting for the jukebox to retune the fried planet. Instead our rocket ship convertibles were soldered into failing orbits like a schoolyard carnival ride & a brooding carnie cut the power lifted the bar & sent us into the dusk’s weak light, feet wobbly on the flattened grass, squinting into pink clouds for fairy floss towers. 5. REENTRY Eventually the scythe of creation drags on our animal mass & even in decay there is pride in having sunk Mont Blanc, in knowing god didn’t want us
feathering such thin air & so we’ll hit the troposphere with an it-was-all-worth-it grin welcome the wet & warm wax down our backs our know-it-all children breaking above the Indian Ocean as seagulls leisurely gyre over the splashdown. 6. GARDEN We all believed it was a path back to fiber optic meadows, the tall glass so smooth, so flesh- like our bare feet could bend the collars to the crown & the blades would sizzle purple & cherry between our toes, faces awash with synthetic wings & the fruit on that frontier would be thick with code, haptics quaking at the lumbering mammoth, at the cats around our feet rendered in resolutions so high we can spy the dilation that telegraphs the spring & we’d finally walk as gods among our machines.
From the writer
:: Account ::
This poem began when my mother gave my wife and me her old console stereo cabinet for our new house. Retrieving it from her basement was a kind of excavation, buried as it was under boxes of preserved mementos from my family: bowling trophies, board games, dolls and action figures. My mother received the stereo for her 16th birthday, which would have been November, 1965, and it was a fixture in my childhood living room well into the 1980s. I played my very first albums, a Sesame Street record and a recording of the Little Engine that Could, on that stereo, a brass arm holding the stacked 33s and dropping the next one to be played onto the turntable. The ark metaphor seemed apt, both because of the cabinet shape, but also due to the way a radio channels invisible voices from the sky. I wanted to capture the aesthetic of that mid-century technology: electricity not sealed in plastic and glass, but trickling behind wood and fabric, the shock of touching a metal knob when your stocking feet have trudged through shag carpet. While my mother’s stereo is a Magnavox, Zenith better fit the poem’s central question: Is there a technological zenith? What if we’ve passed it and are already on the decline? And how will the zenith or decline feel?
The second section admittedly gets a bit abstract as the poem delves into mythology and math—the lightning zee in the Zenith logo evoking both Zeus but also Christ as the logos of God, references to the geometrical notions of zenith and azimuth that I hope set up the rocket launch metaphor in section three. The Camelot section is there to conjure the idealized America of the Kennedy and the space race era—one possible zenith. I hope that Mont Blanc in the Reentry section evokes Shelley and the unforgiving power of nature and physical reality. It increasingly strikes me how our current dreams of technology seek to eliminate the body (think Sam Altman paying Nectome to preserve his brain for digital uploading) and how juvenile such projects are.
The poem ultimately ends with a vision of that imagined Garden of Eden—the digital paradise where sensation is preserved and the body transcended. The final line, written almost a decade ago in the earliest draft of what would eventually become this poem, has only gotten more poignant for me over the years as talk of AI gods displacing humanity becomes more common and our 21st century tech bros smugly ignore the lesson of humanity’s oldest myths: seeking the power of a god always ends in slavery.
Garrett J. Brown is the author of Manna Sifting (Briary Creek Press, 2009), Cubicles (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Galileo in the Uecker Seats (Match Factory Editions, forthcoming). His poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared or is upcoming in TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Passages North, The Account, Broadkill Review, Washington Writers Publishing House Writes! and Beyond Words Magazine. He coordinates the Creative Writing program at Anne Arundel Community College and lives in a Baltimore rowhouse with marble steps and a defunct stereo cabinet in the dining room.