This space,<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
like<\/p>\n
a set of lungs,<\/p>\n
fills up with air,<\/p>\n
which spreads across the<\/p>\n
body like two warm hands, from the space into mind<\/p>\n
full of half forgotten things, parcels of hollow ideas, movements<\/p>\n
of songs and the dreams which you remember occasionally,<\/p>\n
a climbing wave,<\/p>\n
of the reconciliation<\/p>\n
of nature with language, like a ball of string<\/p>\n
that can be undone if you pull<\/p>\n
in the right place, in a second,<\/p>\n
so that many confusions are one,<\/p>\n
and there are no longer words, but<\/p>\n
feelings,<\/p>\n
the feelings of the mind when it vaults out beyond itself and encounters<\/p>\n
no resistance<\/p>\n
so that it cannot stop<\/p>\n
hurtling through the space<\/p>\n
which cannot be seen or felt<\/p>\n
except maybe we when are three or four<\/p>\n
before the language games really begin<\/p>\n
and we become knotted up with words,<\/p>\n
like a first love that deepens past despair<\/p>\n
and then becomes something that<\/p>\n
will always be dying,<\/p>\n
but never dead,<\/p>\n
something that will always be strange, as if fireflies<\/p>\n
don\u2019t die in the mornings, but<\/p>\n
break apart into pieces of living light<\/p>\n
full of the beautiful glooms<\/p>\n
of summer, always the same, but inexorably<\/p>\n
dimmer and dimmer,<\/p>\n
an incongruity between love and time,<\/p>\n
the whirls between sleep which<\/p>\n
moves us on,<\/p>\n
to Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cphilosophical mind\u201d<\/p>\n
which may or may not come<\/p>\n
but is always there in that calm within us that we cannot quite seem to grasp as if<\/p>\n
goodness were made of a diffusion<\/p>\n
and not a substance,<\/p>\n
as if Bethlehem, where I live,<\/p>\n
was more than this collection of<\/p>\n
middle-aged men mowing lawns,<\/p>\n
and Phillies games in the twilight<\/p>\n
on TV,<\/p>\n
all of these wholly decent things,<\/p>\n
which have no end,<\/p>\n
but must end, and cannot continue<\/p>\n
in perpetual decency and wholeness,<\/p>\n
like that summer, two years ago,<\/p>\n
when Emily would make that almost Russian black bread<\/p>\n
late at night, and we would fry it in garlic<\/p>\n
and olive oil<\/p>\n
and just talk<\/p>\n
about where we were<\/p>\n
while our parents slept<\/p>\n
in the house where they have always slept,<\/p>\n
in the house where, somehow,<\/p>\n
my imagination found it\u2019s growth,<\/p>\n
as if it were a hearty seed,<\/p>\n
clinging to a barren hill,<\/p>\n
this simple decency and goodness,<\/p>\n
without peculiarities except those which all of us carry around<\/p>\n
in our heads, but cannot share,<\/p>\n
a series of looping equations that<\/p>\n
never cross or can be proven,<\/p>\n
to cross but are only probabilities<\/p>\n
like whether Emily will choose or not choose<\/p>\n
to make bread, whether<\/p>\n
the language game will be won or lost,<\/p>\n
at a given curve and sudden<\/p>\n
drop<\/p>\n
in time,<\/p>\n
as if the complexity of our garden<\/p>\n
was mirrored in the house,<\/p>\n
and somehow multiplied in the some pure<\/p>\n
unmappable clarity, in the space,<\/p>\n
the full stream of inner space,<\/p>\n
which can never be isolated,<\/p>\n
in it\u2019s perfect purity,<\/p>\n
that music which was torn apart,<\/p>\n
by the Bacchantes awhile ago,<\/p>\n
and occasionally reassembles itself<\/p>\n
in one of us, and fills us with sorrow<\/p>\n
for the Eurydice<\/p>\n
we never even knew,<\/p>\n
but feel, somehow, is everywhere, is<\/p>\n
always turning into salt before our eyes,<\/p>\n
as if Bethlehem was not a series of storefronts<\/p>\n
and homes, but a giant resistance<\/p>\n
in the space of the self,<\/p>\n
always unwilling to<\/p>\n
be assimilated into the system of imagination, always reserving for itself<\/p>\n
some unimaginable grief,<\/p>\n
wave-like in it\u2019s rippling<\/p>\n
and spreading,<\/p>\n
not memory precisely, but<\/p>\n
the muted logic of memory,<\/p>\n
the meaning of what memory means,<\/p>\n
not just a passing,<\/p>\n
but an overcoming of the imagination<\/p>\n
that has not been resolved into a unity<\/p>\n
and probably cannot be despite our trying,<\/p>\n
despite the instances of isolations,<\/p>\n
when we seem to grasp the problem,<\/p>\n
and shatter all the mirrors so that we see<\/p>\n
only the important, single image, not<\/p>\n
of a space, but of what is beyond<\/p>\n
the space, and feeds it,<\/p>\n
from the stream of everything that runs away,<\/p>\n
sounds that cannot be arrested,<\/p>\n
the dog\u2019s barking, birds, and<\/p>\n
the coffeemaker, sudden illuminations of<\/p>\n
the being that cannot be repeated<\/p>\n
though they always are,<\/p>\n
in loops and jangles<\/p>\n
of days and nights which hang from us,<\/p>\n
like the colorful materials of an expressionist painter, or<\/p>\n
an Indian headdress rendered by D\u00fcrer,<\/p>\n
and every other literalist<\/p>\n
of the imagination<\/p>\n
which is never literal and has no end,<\/p>\n
but the vagaries of doubt<\/p>\n
and the ash-heap of dying,<\/p>\n
but can stretch itself out and out and out<\/p>\n
on laughter, or love-making and<\/p>\n
all the other bewilderments of the being<\/p>\n
we employ to<\/p>\n
get us through life,<\/p>\n
to death, or whatever it is:<\/p>\n
poetry,<\/p>\n
or,<\/p>\n
the heart burnt out, but revived by air<\/p>\n
exhaled from a giant\u2019s chest,<\/p>\n
the fabric of space,<\/p>\n
oddly aflutter,<\/p>\n
like an angel\u2019s white feathers<\/p>\n
as it descends to earth, this<\/p>\n
poetry or revival,<\/p>\n
this essence of self-creation, which<\/p>\n
is created but not contained, and is<\/p>\n
just an assemblage of words<\/p>\n
which forms it\u2019s own rules<\/p>\n
that do not say when the game will end<\/p>\n
but only that it is perfectly beautiful,<\/p>\n
gathering itself and feeding itself on<\/p>\n
a space:<\/p>\n
whatever space:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
within and around us:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
as it<\/p>\n
collapses,<\/p>\n
and<\/p>\n
folds,<\/p>\n
and floods:<\/p>\n
with the images of life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Matthew Gasda is a poet living in NYC. He prefers to write his poems in the morning, with a cup of green tea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This space, like a set of lungs, fills up with air, which spreads across the body like two warm hands, from the space into mind full of half forgotten things, parcels of hollow ideas, movements of songs and the dreams which you remember occasionally, a climbing wave, of the reconciliation of nature with language, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,219,199],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=966"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3278,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/966\/revisions\/3278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}