levelheaded: Blue

In this poem’s opening line, the speaker lets us know up front that she can only “try to tell” us her story. She has approximations of “the way it tastes”—a vague sweetness hidden in something harsh—but there are limits to what her words convey. Language fails, and we carry the knowledge of its failure into the other interlocking parts of the poem.  Cousin J doesn’t really smile “like a / little prince.” It’s imperfect to say quiet “blooms into silence.” The speaker tries to tell us, but she knows that no one can ever tell the whole of anything.

It’s a common idea in poetry. Language is imperfect. Whatever our intent, it conceals important details about the world it describes. This works especially well as a core idea in this poem because this poem is also about how we conceal real things in a real world, and how those hidden objects are reflected in our internal, emotional worlds. Let’s look at some of the “hidden” things in the poem:

• “Water hiding / Cousin J’s feet”: This moment ties the taste of whiskey to the rest of the poem. The sweet/harsh flavor is the poem’s madeleine. It triggers the memories in the poem. The moment works because there is literal water in the whiskey and in the pool/lake/river that conceals Cousin J’s feet. The water presages the “peaceful” water that shows up later in the poem.

• “the value of long hair, / something to hide behind”: Where Cousin J’s feet were hidden in water, “M and I” hide behind their own long hair. They hide behind a part of themselves. Here, the poem also introduces a vaguely threatening silence—something the speaker believes is worth hiding from.

• “whiskey hidden / in tabasco bottle”: The hidden whiskey becomes one of the poem’s central threads. But like the earlier “silence,” it’s an ambiguous menace to the poem’s serene family quality. We aren’t sure who hid the whiskey, or why. But just after these lines we’re told, “no one says / what they really think.” Presumably, this goes for the speaker too.

In the end, when the speaker tries not to swallow or spit, she conceals her own disgust. Her literal disgust is a metaphor for her displeasure with something else, something under the surface. Just as she hid behind her own hair, she also hides behind language, behind the poetry. It’s not exactly clear what’s bubbling up, so the poem exists as an enactment of the speaker not saying what she really thinks. Instead of admitting, or internalizing, what disgusts her, she grimaces and tells us “How beautiful the trees are.”

-The Editors