levelheaded: Keep

The futility of the speaker’s final cry, “[b]ut we must keep weaving one another,” speaks for the poem as much as the title does. This final line, in which the speaker begs her companion to keep going, represents the attempt to move on in the face of a tragedy, namely Pete’s death. The attempt falls short, hence the abrupt title, hence the begging that leads not to an answer but to the poem’s abrupt end.

The collapse of all the characters in the poem is described through obtuse images that manage to be clear. “Stephanie became night smoke,” “[Sarah] dreamt the coming dissolution,” “[Kelly] broke herself against a wall.” We might interpret the images differently, but clearly things are not going well; darkness is taking over and sanity is at risk.

Zaikowski mixes incoherent context with coherent emotions. Stephanie “passed from tree to ash” while Sarah’s “lungs [were] cracking jokes,” perhaps unwillingly or hysterically as a post-trauma coping mechanism. Significantly, it’s her lungs, not her mouth or her brain that cracks the jokes. Cracking also connotes breaking, falling to pieces. Kelly too, knew “[e]verything must die[,]” but the rational does not allow her to keep from breaking herself against a wall.

The poem, in its context and form, is chaos within supposed order. The tercets, which reinforce the weaving introduced by the final line, are maintained throughout the four stanzas, but within them there’s disorder. The first two stanzas feature two sentences. The third has only one. The fourth has four, one of which ends with no period. So we have a clear, stanzaic order imposed, within which order is lost. Such is exactly the case with the moment of death. Life leaves Pete’s body as “[a] startled matrix,” a rational form overtaken by its preceding emotional adjective, signifying distress, shock, disbelief.

– The Editors