levelheaded: from I Live Here Now

We can’t say precisely what “space” is being “continued” or where the “exhausted returning” is returning from, but it’s clear from the beginning that this short poem is an extension of something we can’t see—and not simply because the poem is excerpted from a larger series. The poem’s early abstractions remind us that a specific set of events and influences has brought the speaker, the ideas, the poet, and us together into the moment that becomes our sitting down to read it.

Every line (except for the last) ends with that most ambiguous of punctuation marks: the comma. In some cases, the lines build off of one another. For instance, “the act alone constructs the memory net” is sandwiched between a line that refers to “a photo” and one that refers to “the actual picture.” The “act” itself, seems most obviously the act of taking a picture. Other lines seem less dependent on their surroundings. If the wonderfully terse line “we sweater up” roots us momentarily in action (even if the action arrives as “sweater” in its unconventional verb form), we’re cast back out to sea by the line “color falls[.]”

Even without perfect clarity, that aforementioned line, “the act alone constructs the memory net,” is a key to the poem. Photos and “antiques of modern life on bedroom walls” can be seen as the filaments used to construct this “memory net.” Just as “a photo is only good if you remember to take it[,]” a photo is only good if you remember to look at it. And it’s only as good as memories it conjures (or the “blush” it incites). Or, to take the opposite approach, some memories only exist because we’ve recorded our lives so extensively.

It’s important that the final line uses the phrase “wants to believe.” The poem leaves open the possibility that everyone’s relationship with the world actually is “unique,” reminding us instead that the signifiers we use to represent that “unique” place we all come from—the smiles in photographs, the photographs hanging on walls, and words we use to tell related stories—are necessarily universal. Those are not “unique” to us at all, and our positions in the world, however unique they may be, are extensions of a complex but collective past.

– The Editors