Leveler Poetry Journal
About Leveler Submission Guidelines More Poems

Chateau  Deux Margots

 

Each part of the system is just a part of some other system that you fold
yourself into: the body into family: family into society and so on until
it eventually breaks down into the inevitable entropy of desire
when you’re only marginally aware of the endless white space that waits for
you at the edge of the fictional landmass of the self. You struggle hard enough
to deliver the raw, continual pain of sex or servitude, but even then you
can’t scare off the feeling that the unchained angels on either side of you are
waiting for you to go. It’s not just that I feel some moral voices takes
honey with lemon, it’s that for some reason you and I are astonishingly perceptive
in the ways that the soul can ruin itself alive. But these lands, these plates
of feeling, are only impressive for the way they box you in: something
I learned early was how to speak to myself in prayer
as if the evolution of the self depended entirely on cajoling and nagging
and not on some mindful inattention to birds or flowers or children playing.
What I fear most are ordinary things: what you fear most are evenings in
the country when the sun sets so beautifully that you never want to stop living.
The syntax of a star on a tree is so strange that you wouldn’t know how to
phrase it even if you could speak in poetry. The external world continually
mirrors your internal self-deception until the two are indistinguishable.
I do not believe in nothing… but I don’t disbelieve in it either:
the idea is just insufficient to explain how people grow up to love. The zone
Of art is the only place where someone can say for sure that I am here
and you are over there, that the integration of desire is only a way to
reciprocate solipsism into a feeling and not a single, awful thought.
In a loose world, the mind can leap anywhere, be utterly free. All afternoon
I’ve been on the verge of being shot to infinity, at least since I saw you dis
assemble the morning into day. Closer and closer the mother and father get
towards giving you hope and charity: the human soul as of yet remains
human so you have to consider that this kind of suffering is natural. Weirdly
the thought that nothing comes after your evening bath isn’t numbing, it
electrifies you with the consciousness of a crime. I’d like to disclose
my subjectivity so that this anagram of regular old days at home
can stop being such a secret. It’s just a way you decided you wanted to feel
when you saw there was a storm coming on the horizon. It will ease the
guilt you have for longing so much, anyway. It will ease the guilt that you
said you were keeping for someone else when they arrived: and

 

your whole life you’ve been trying to stand within yourself as a way of having
form and illuminating the network of defensive tropes that you made
out of Sunday nights, autumn fields, French novels, and the blue
ironed out silk of dying alone: but you like the small, mystical
organism that you are becoming but have always refused to admit that you
always were: atuned to the naturalness of opiate sunlight or the cells breaking
apart inside of you, starving for energy, copying themselves so poorly that you age.
The front lawn flutters windlessly like flame when the Sycamore decides
it’s time for winter and you have to rake the leaves into the gutter to be
taken away by city ordinance. Don’t you recognize the erotic disaster of our
present life together? How indirect the miracles have become and how old
and outmoded our best sayings sound when you whisper them to me?
I liked to twist the wheatstems in the field just behind the house
near the traintracks, glean the milk from the kernels, use my hands for real,
natural labor: you, in the course of all these years have just been waiting for the
mystery to recede like a wave jerked back by the tide: I wipe my mouth, I
wend my body back into the darkness of yet another rising, making
coffee, looking in the mirror, answering, shaving, taking the dog for a walk
knowing that self-consciousness can only deepen up to a certain point
before you realize that you don’t have the strength to get past the poems that
were already in the way: really the mind should be so bright as to engulf
the whole past in its transparency, but instead, we withdraw, broken back into
our own externality of self. My favorite thing is to make tea with rosemary and
sage leaves, let it boil for an hour, down to a concentrated cupful. Heat and taste:
these things are more refined in us than any single idea: even the thought of
loving someone seems distasteful when compared to dying.
Looking at it from the point of view of human DNA, everything is un-
deconstructable unless you pierce it through with imagination. Ordinary lives
continue: romantic memories keep being slagged off as fiction:
only with our concave chests open to the presence of goodness can
we undermine the whole conceptual framework of nihilism. Compassion
could crack the mind like a bell, as you say: truth undeciphers itself like a song.
You llay your hands on yourself dying, but the constitution of the afterlife
won’t change at all. Unlike adulterers, we are simply trying to survive.
It will swallow us, the light coming in through the kitchen window. It
Will turn us into atoms: I’ll repeat: let’s it try again, you and I, with thou.




Matthew Gasda

levelheaded: Chateau Deux Margots

 

French title for a poem in English? Better be a good reason. And beware the metaphysics, ethics, semantics, and their gnarly brothers that are sure, given the first lines, to permeate the poem.

 

What saves this poem from striking us as too high-flown is that the speaker speaks in hinge, connecting disparate elements and permitting movement/emotion. His first proclamation, “Each part of the system is just a part of some other system that you fold / yourself into: the body into family: family into society and so on,” is enacted in his manner of communication. Generally, this guy relies on the arrangement, his arrangement, of his ideas. The organization he enforces—the poem is written in two sections, each of 36 lines, with a split at the midpoint—and his hinge-like way, the back-and-forth motion, brings to mind circulation (as blood in the body), surges: providing and proving warmth and flexibility, if not exactly or always comfort.

 

What do we mean with this hinge business? Ethereal concepts become relatives of, family of, other ethereal concepts. And what are we referring to, “ethereal concepts”? Trademark language such as “inevitable entropy of desire,” “fictional landmass of the self,” “continual pain of sex or servitude,” “this anagram of regular old days at home / can stop being such a secret,” “you’ve been trying to stand within yourself as a way of having / form,” (o man, just beautiful!), and so on. Okay, so ethereal concepts, due to their nature, are a little hard to pin down. They’re the parts of the poem that hit you as delicate, airy, full of philosophy, meaningful yet un-paraphrasable.

 

The ethereal is made solid in Gasda’s universe. He is simply stating the way things are, and the way they are is factual, confident, and specific. He may not completely control the motion of things through his world, but he does control their motion relative to other things populating his world. At the same time as he connects and pumps life through, he limits. Gasda at least partially achieves this effect through the repeated use of the words “just” and “only.” For example, we have “the inevitable entropy of desire / when you’re only marginally aware,” and “these plates / of feeling, are only impressive,” and “the idea is just insufficient to explain how people grow up to love,” among others.

 

JUST (guided by justice, precisely, barely, only) / ONLY (alone, single, just)

 

As you see, these two words can even overlap in meaning. Both can have a dismissive quality to them, which engages, equals, tips into relationship what lives on either side of his utterance. Overall, the effect is that everything sounds conclusive, measured, a little sleepy—even when the content tests us.

 

That Gasda uses two words to rock the poem echoes his frequent use of doubles (and mirrors). Like the just/only deal, doubles appear as forceful combos throughout the piece, powerfully one-two punching: “as if the evolution of the self depended on [. . .] / and not on,” “What I fear most are [. . .]: what you fear most are [. . .],” “I do not believe in nothing . . . but I don’t disbelieve in it either.”

 

As it’s so carefully wrought, nearly composed and fraught, the best parts of the poem are those absolute and sure-footed lines that refrain from participating in the balance of the poem: “All afternoon / I’ve been on the verge of being shot to infinity,” “It will ease the guilt that you / said you were keeping for someone else when they arrived,” “Don’t you recognize the erotic disaster of our / present life together?” and, just dazzlingly, “Compassion / could crack the mind like a bell.”

 

We have moved, at the devising control of this speaker, from eye-rolling at the initial pomp, to compassion: for the poem, for the speaker, for the poet, for the possible inter-relatedness of everything.

 

 

– The Editors