I
The intricacies of a hummingbird’s wings are
extraordinarily clear if you close your eyes
and let the folds of existence pack themselves
together and condense into something crystalline,
like a pure thought we can use to pare away the dark
that grows like an onionskin around the light
or truth, so that we can
live without these incredible efforts to
control unpredictability as if life were really just a matter of arranging
everything we see despite the fact that there is wind
and stillness which cannot be captured by the eye
except as they brighten through the leaves of creation,
which is proof that maybe love is always enjoining itself with the
invisible tangles of stars which we can only find
in our night-wanderings, amazed,
by the music of inward space
and the absence of light in ourselves which we
can’t reconcile with the incredible kindlings of Greek beauty
that happen when we aren’t so concerned with how the patterns
of our best ideas arrange themselves
but rather
forget that we ever had any ideas at all,
as if life was just a stream of sensations, kissing
in the grass in the summer, deep and truthful,
and the taste of homemade bread and barefoot walks around
the block in the middle of the night with our hands
pressed together and sweat on our upper lips,
and all the other balancings at our center, lovely and right, like a
brilliant resistance to time
and reality, sewing with dark thread the shadows of existence
together in exquisite assertions of new
delicate life or what is really just called happiness,
in a language that can’t really get at the richness
of the milk of time swirling in a bowl,
and the memory of the dead, bound
so tenderly in sheaves of flowers…
But clarity leaves us and we are left without
any ideas on how to live, or
how to even wake up the right way, braiding our
dreams into the day so that our mornings
and afternoons spark with the tenderness of the
thought-creating fires, or a poetry
which is the access to the mind’s plain truth
or what Blake called the combination of love and harmony
when we send down roots from our souls into the ground of being
which is not in any particular place but rests
underneath everything,
so that it does not matter where we grew up because
worlds will always open up to our touch like
soft flowerheads at the first touch of sunlight
shedding fragrant dreams which if we
were older we could recognize as the ideas behind dreams
and not the dreams themselves which is
why we are always finding ourselves lost
because we have no first principals to guide us,
only this intrinsic attachment to certain moments which
we can never link up to the fact that all
good things at one time or another occurred in the present
and that we can never realize at the time it’s
happening that this is something we are going to remember
as if life were lived constantly in the past
and the present existed only so that it could break off from the
growing block of time into the silver pool of regret which is just another
word for what we previously called happiness,
this stunning sadness and longing for more life which spins
like a whirlpool to
draw creation in
and which we cannot navigate around,
because it is
better to be jumbled up then flattened out
and perfected because perfection can never really be achieved
except on the smallest scale, so that perfection demands a million
concessions at the quantum level and leaves us alone with just this:
which is a comfort without love.
There is no organizing principal… just
a series of possibilities and counter-possibilities,
intuitions maybe, that life is full of a magic and charm
which is our only source of real vitality and which,
if shut off
in the name of becoming more “realistic”
we die,
forever and break off like a shard of bone into the circulation of
time that will eventually reach the center and puncture the heart.
It is through our imaginative power that we unweave the dreams
of birth
and death into a blossom of laughter or the first
touch before a kiss, on the arm or neck or cheek,
full of a gentleness which fractures our
undetermined hearts so that the deepest
illuminations shine through the breaks
at the center of our self
and reveals the immaculate imagery
in the ideas we grew up with,
love of family
and the basic integrity of the language with
which we describe the world,
as if language were a reverberation of
the
shimmering wholeness of flowers, trees, and
freshly cut grass:
or the arc of the summer under the
dogwood tree, and bike rides to the dairy store
to get ice-cream at the point of the sun’s acutest vanishing,
beyond the violet song of space:
II
We must hear the radical light or else we fail to
see radical music which clusters
and breaks out of our mind and connects our loose dreams of eachother
in a continuum
of beautiful phenemena
like the fluttering of gold-winged birds
accelerating out of the morning darkness
which is when you most feel the force of love, as
if your irises had fingertips and could
feel the sudden breakthroughs of form into
the heart:
which is all poetry is, this
isolation of a feeling concealed in the fragility of memories and places, like a
sacred fountain in a Greek myth, full of the essential purity and
integrity of faith
or the perception of a pattern in time
through which we can stare right through as if time were the space
between the hummingbird’s wings
always obscured by the after-image where the wings
once were and must come back together again
so that we see something that both is and is not,
which explains why the dead are never really dead
in memory but exist as impressions of themselves in us
like fragments of left-over light
which are not really fragments, but
points of clarity like spyglasses through which
we watch each other’s summer-dreams
strung together in a spider’s-silkline
of melancholy magic: enchantments of
the rain and humid thunder,
movies late at night with cheap wine and tea,
when happiness comes suddenly
and all the discrete moments of our lives
assemble into a stream and
flow into the present to form a
density of feeling, an awareness of the heaviness of our
bodies, sunburned and warm
to the touch as if we had passed
beyond suffering into a space
uncircumscribed by anything, by a self-consciousness
which is boundless and ever augmenting,
evading a central fixity which would mean admitting that life
is simple and that all delight and sweetness vanishes beyond
the point at which we try to understand it,
as if understanding just meant
closing our eyes
and falling asleep in the wet grass
while we listen to the chirp, chirp
of the mystical cicadas in the trees.
Matthew Gasda is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently trying to raise money to publish his first book of poetry through Kickstarter. You can find his project HERE.
