Second
Anniversary
On the outskirts, at the end of a one-way
street,
a blind fiddler recreates our stroll down the
aisle.
Two flower girls dance together—twirling redheads
secured by translucent strings, one to bow, one
to scroll.
A pause for vows. We jig to Scottish ceilidh
tunes,
the tracks we had chosen for our reception.
The program’s there on a stand in front of him,
toasts and cake-cutting about to come. Bouquet toss
pencilled in.
The shopkeep, committing, ends our nuptuals
with a broom;
he’s going to sweep away the petals for a new
trinity—
fragrant perfumes, compact mirrors, stoles of
fox fur.
Jonathan Ball’s blurb on the back cover of Matthew Gwathmey’s full-length poetry debut, Our Latest in Folktales (London ON:
Brick Books, 2019), might describe such as a “mishmash,” but it seems obvious
from the first poem onward that this book, consistently throughout, is occupied
with time. The impression from the first half-dozen or so of these formal,
first-person narratives, “Franklin the Icebreaker,” “At Arcadia Dump, Later On,”
“Turning Thirty,” “Turning Thirty-Three” and “Sister Album,” suggest a gaze
that is impossibly fixed on time as a multiple, gazing forward or backward, but
never exclusively on the matter-at-hand. Once one makes it through further of
the book, it becomes obvious that, as a unit, Gwathmey’s poems explore a
progression of time—the coupling of poems such as “Turning Thirty” and “Turning
Thirty-Three” to “Second Anniversary and Ninth Anniversary”—but individually
seem to explore time as something that exists separately and concurrently. His
sense of past, present and future exists as both weight and lightness, tether
and foundation, existing in ways that are impossible to extricate from, nor
would he ever wish to, if he is to remain whole. Moving from short lyrics to
prose poems to slightly longer stretches of lyric sequences, Gwathmey revels in
revealing that he (his narrator, etcetera) is in possession of knowledge
greater than what is being presented, but also that such knowledge is woefully
incomplete, writing poems that both tease and strive, revealing and furthering
an impossible reach. What is it he’s reaching for?
At Arcadia
Dump, Later On
We meet a shepherd amid a trail of discarded
electronics, his staff assembled out of PVC pipe. Impressive, his change from a
parabola of methane to a camber of mercury, summing up the whole landfille
season that stretches before us. “When I started,” he says, “I had everything I
needed in the cloud.” The smell of Sulphur caught in the art of natural
selection—a breezy genetic drift. We watch a few beady-eyed sheep play off the
dumping ground (darting noses, probing hooves against the slag-heap edge, wool
newly wet). Avian swimmers dodge steam-powered waves. Country folk dressed in
hazmat suits search the undershow, snoop through garbage bags. At a yelp they
huddle to marvel at a crunched statistic or a shiny zippo. The siren signals
the next level of hide ye mouse and seek ye cat. Soon, the falling sky will be
close at hand.
For
Gwathmey, his consideration of time includes the Acadians, psych wards,
fishing, video chat, ageing and the Franklin Expedition, elements and stories and
tales passed through generations that exist throughout time, moving backward
and forward, at times reconsidered and rewritten, whether the opening poem “Franklin
the Icebreaker” writing of “Only pummellings / of gossip roam free, / wafting
through stalled boats /waiting for the icebreaker.” or to the closing poem, “Les Mimes de Paris,” that offers a
reconsideration of history from a small group of (presumed) youths in the Metro,
writing: “In steel-toed boots, laces untied, / they depart at Invalides / to
question Napoleon’s tomb / about his contribution / to the war effort.” His are
poems that wish to not only pass along those stories, but add some of his own,
for posterity’s sake.
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