levelheaded: I Climbed on Top of a Viewpoint that Unfortunately You Could Not See

The gist of Sean Shearer’s poem lies in the tension between the physical and the abstract. The title directly sets up this tension: the speaker climbs (physical) a viewpoint (abstract). He’ll soon be using materials, bodies, locations (physical), to convey ideas, struggles, tension (abstract).

Let’s make a list. Physical: a lake, a fox, a mouth, sewage, bedroom, nose, grass, metal–and there are more in this short yet well-packed poem. Abstract: viewpoint, appearances, suspension, teachings, courage. At times physical is more precisely sensual. At times what’s abstract is emotional, painful. The word “magnetic” (which for a moment “everything was”) is the peak: the physical is magnetic, the emotional too. There are more of those in-between words: “mist,” “bled,” perhaps others.

So we know a point was to be made, but it failed to come through. That’s our title. And we know the poem is set up through appearances (opens with two “You appeared to me” sentences). And we know “Everything” and “Everyone” is magnetic, or bleeding. There’s a lot of liquid, dripping, milking. There are knives and sliced organs. Quite an explosion.

So much for the atmosphere. Now let’s start over and see what we can make of this.

Being in the “bedroom,” with “face[s]” and “mouth[s]” and “climb[ing] on top,” let’s assume “You” and “I” are lovers. Our speaker sees his lover, and the apparition is powerful. His lover is a lake one moment, and a fox eating sewage where there is no lake the next moment. The lover is then a “silver mist”–shining, either tangible and awe-inspiring, or rather unattainable, perhaps hostile. Now come three sentences of power: He sticks his face inside her mist. She appears as a tinfoil cloud in a metal ocean. Everything is magnetic. Make what you want of these images, one way or another they convey a strong energy, and its nature is ambiguous: intimate, sensual, hostile.

The final part grows more abstract. The grass turns to rusty knives, feet (the basis of stability) are sliced, and it all serves the purpose of teaching the speaker a lesson in courage. What is he learning–it’s hard to say. Was he learning to jump into a mist, unafraid to explore? Was he being taught not to formulate obtrude points of view when much more efficient are mouths and noses? And is this poem actually about lovers? Your guess is as good as ours.

This is how this poem works: it showers us with verbal fireworks. It gives us opportunities to read courageously, and we end up unsure of what we learned, but sure we learned something.

– The Editors