What would life would be like if you were in the middle of a Grateful Dead song. Or you were moving a lot, and you suddenly realized there’s a lot of life that passed, and you’ve been moving so much you may or may not have noticed that. And you’re doing an art of moving, and you know that would be hard to master, because moving has a lot of moving parts to it.
And in Molly Ledbetter’s poem, “Althea,” the moving quality of the parts, and the poet’s sometimes desire to put them together, and sometimes ambivalence about what it means to put things together, and sometimes “Fuck it. It’s all together!” attitude is exactly what makes the poem so moving. And I mean “moving” like it affects me emotionally. And I mean “moving” like how the poem’s form just keep urging Ledbetter’s sentiment along. Which leaves the poem extremely open-ended about how to read it. When the poet sees the line from a Grateful Dead song, “this too shall pass,” and all the reasons why she would see that line where she saw it come to bear on what she thinks of it, she’s abashed. Is it saying the most obvious thing so it’s the most annoying thing ever? Is saying the obvious thing with genuine concern too simple? Or is saying the obvious thing speaking a truth she knows others will hear because that obvious thing has fit into their own life at the right time?
If it feels like everything in Ledbetter’s poem is like one of those labyrinths you find on the floor of a cathedral, and walking it is supposed to put you in a meditative state, you’re getting close to how I read her poem. But then think of that labyrinth and how it might relate to a tie-dye t-shirt you find at a Grateful Dead concert, and how meaningful that t-shirt would be for a Deadhead. I don’t think Ledbetter is a Deadhead. I think the Grateful Dead has a meaningfulness to the poem that takes Ledbetter out of her own head about what she might usually think about the Grateful Dead. So, ultimately, it’s confusing about which of the stances she’s taking to her own poem, and how anyone should read the poem based on her poetic stance? Does the poem exist in a sentimental light? Ironically? Does its placement in an issue of Annulet elevate how someone reads it? Does its single prose line lineation complicate that elevated view?
I think the poem only slightly gestures to the larger topic at hand. Something seems to have happened to the poet’s brother. Something tragic. That the poem can’t entirely lay hold of. Kind of like how the poem looks at the Grateful Dead from many different angles. I suspect the brother had some connection to the band. Which is only meaningful because of the poet’s complicated feelings to them. But all these ways the poem surrounds a subject, and is engrossed in what it might mean for the poet to be thinking about a subject, kind of avoiding it, and kind of finding true-to-life moments, that is what would be the “healer of wounds” for this poem, if I had to explain what I think is happening in the title. But what I really appreciate is that the poem exists and thinks without needing to make a point about why it would exist. But it needs to exist for me. And that, to me, is what makes the poem so tragic. Or capable of expressing tragedy in a “naked” light. Though the artfulness of the poem crafts that nakedness into something that feels more “nude” to the moment.