{"id":1675,"date":"2011-09-18T21:44:40","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T01:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=1675"},"modified":"2012-07-15T20:12:01","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T00:12:01","slug":"summer-monological-by-matthew-gasda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/summer-monological-by-matthew-gasda\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Monological"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I<\/p>\n

The intricacies of a hummingbird\u2019s wings are
\nextraordinarily clear if you close your eyes
\nand let the folds of existence pack themselves
\ntogether and condense into something crystalline,
\nlike a pure thought we can use to pare away the dark
\nthat grows like an onionskin around the light
\nor truth, so that we can
\nlive without these incredible efforts to
\ncontrol unpredictability as if life were really just a matter of arranging
\neverything we see despite the fact that there is wind
\nand stillness which cannot be captured by the eye
\nexcept as they brighten through the leaves of creation,
\nwhich is proof that maybe love is always enjoining itself with the
\ninvisible tangles of stars which we can only find
\nin our night-wanderings, amazed,
\nby the music of inward space
\nand the absence of light in ourselves which we
\ncan\u2019t reconcile with the incredible kindlings of Greek beauty
\nthat happen when we aren\u2019t so concerned with how the patterns
\nof our best ideas arrange themselves
\nbut rather
\nforget that we ever had any ideas at all,
\nas if life was just a stream of sensations, kissing
\nin the grass in the summer, deep and truthful,
\nand the taste of homemade bread and barefoot walks around
\nthe block in the middle of the night with our hands
\npressed together and sweat on our upper lips,
\nand all the other balancings at our center, lovely and right, like a
\nbrilliant resistance to time
\nand reality, sewing with dark thread the shadows of existence
\ntogether in exquisite assertions of new
\ndelicate life or what is really just called happiness,
\nin a language that can\u2019t really get at the richness
\nof the milk of time swirling in a bowl,
\nand the memory of the dead, bound
\nso tenderly in sheaves of flowers…<\/p>\n

But clarity leaves us and we are left without
\nany ideas on how to live, or
\nhow to even wake up the right way, braiding our
\ndreams into the day so that our mornings
\nand afternoons spark with the tenderness of the
\nthought-creating fires, or a poetry
\nwhich is the access to the mind\u2019s plain truth
\nor what Blake called the combination of love and harmony
\nwhen we send down roots from our souls into the ground of being
\nwhich is not in any particular place but rests
\nunderneath everything,
\nso that it does not matter where we grew up because
\nworlds will always open up to our touch like
\nsoft flowerheads at the first touch of sunlight
\nshedding fragrant dreams which if we
\nwere older we could recognize as the ideas behind dreams
\nand not the dreams themselves which is
\nwhy we are always finding ourselves lost
\nbecause we have no first principals to guide us,
\nonly this intrinsic attachment to certain moments which
\nwe can never link up to the fact that all
\ngood things at one time or another occurred in the present
\nand that we can never realize at the time it\u2019s
\nhappening that this is something we are going to remember
\nas if life were lived constantly in the past
\nand the present existed only so that it could break off from the
\ngrowing block of time into the silver pool of regret which is just another
\nword for what we previously called happiness,
\nthis stunning sadness and longing for more life which spins
\nlike a whirlpool to
\ndraw creation in
\nand which we cannot navigate around,
\nbecause it is
\nbetter to be jumbled up then flattened out
\nand perfected because perfection can never really be achieved
\nexcept on the smallest scale, so that perfection demands a million
\nconcessions at the quantum level and leaves us alone with just this:
\nwhich is a comfort without love.<\/p>\n

There is no organizing principal… just
\na series of possibilities and counter-possibilities,
\nintuitions maybe, that life is full of a magic and charm
\nwhich is our only source of real vitality and which,
\nif shut off
\nin the name of becoming more \u201crealistic\u201d
\nwe die,
\nforever and break off like a shard of bone into the circulation of
\ntime that will eventually reach the center and puncture the heart.<\/p>\n

It is through our imaginative power that we unweave the dreams
\nof birth
\nand death into a blossom of laughter or the first
\ntouch before a kiss, on the arm or neck or cheek,
\nfull of a gentleness which fractures our
\nundetermined hearts so that the deepest
\nilluminations shine through the breaks
\nat the center of our self
\nand reveals the immaculate imagery
\nin the ideas we grew up with,
\nlove of family
\nand the basic integrity of the language with
\nwhich we describe the world,
\nas if language were a reverberation of
\nthe
\nshimmering wholeness of flowers, trees, and
\nfreshly cut grass:
\nor the arc of the summer under the
\ndogwood tree, and bike rides to the dairy store
\nto get ice-cream at the point of the sun\u2019s acutest vanishing,
\nbeyond the violet song of space:<\/p>\n

II<\/p>\n

We must hear the radical light or else we fail to
\nsee radical music which clusters
\nand breaks out of our mind and connects our loose dreams of eachother
\nin a continuum
\nof beautiful phenemena
\nlike the fluttering of gold-winged birds
\naccelerating out of the morning darkness
\nwhich is when you most feel the force of love, as
\nif your irises had fingertips and could
\nfeel the sudden breakthroughs of form into
\nthe heart:
\nwhich is all poetry is, this
\nisolation of a feeling concealed in the fragility of memories and places, like a
\nsacred fountain in a Greek myth, full of the essential purity and
\nintegrity of faith
\nor the perception of a pattern in time
\nthrough which we can stare right through as if time were the space
\nbetween the hummingbird\u2019s wings
\nalways obscured by the after-image where the wings
\nonce were and must come back together again
\nso that we see something that both is and is not,
\nwhich explains why the dead are never really dead
\nin memory but exist as impressions of themselves in us
\nlike fragments of left-over light
\nwhich are not really fragments, but
\npoints of clarity like spyglasses through which
\nwe watch each other\u2019s summer-dreams
\nstrung together in a spider\u2019s-silkline
\nof melancholy magic: enchantments of
\nthe rain and humid thunder,
\nmovies late at night with cheap wine and tea,
\nwhen happiness comes suddenly
\nand all the discrete moments of our lives
\nassemble into a stream and
\nflow into the present to form a
\ndensity of feeling, an awareness of the heaviness of our
\nbodies, sunburned and warm
\nto the touch as if we had passed
\nbeyond suffering into a space
\nuncircumscribed by anything, by a self-consciousness
\nwhich is boundless and ever augmenting,
\nevading a central fixity which would mean admitting that life
\nis simple and that all delight and sweetness vanishes beyond
\nthe point at which we try to understand it,
\nas if understanding just meant
\nclosing our eyes
\nand falling asleep in the wet grass
\nwhile we listen to the chirp, chirp
\nof the mystical cicadas in the trees.<\/p>\n

Matthew Gasda is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. \u00a0He is currently trying to raise money to publish his first book of poetry through Kickstarter. \u00a0You can find his project HERE<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I The intricacies of a hummingbird\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,223,219,199],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1675"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3267,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions\/3267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}