Chad Weeden
the ice stayed but the water left
Broken Tribe Press
Reviewer: Erica Goss
An enigmatic presence inhabits Chad Weeden’s poetry collection, the ice stayed but the water left, one whose voice possesses the ability to transform the quotidian into glowing slivers of meaning. At times distant, but never aloof, this presence serves as a guide through a shifting landscape of ostensibly ordinary events. From ships to smokestacks to a traveling salesman’s insights, Weeden navigates a world balanced between mystery and possibility.
“From the bleachers to the starting gate, / we bare our rituals of hazard.” These lines from “Bridled” illustrate that unique quality of Weeden’s poetry, with its swerves and allusions. While investigating a gambler’s view on horse racing, with references to “Lady Luck” and “the bargain fortune teller,” larger issues smolder beneath the surface: “It’s a sure thing, the teller says, / … this sprint into singularity, // to be has-been satellite specks in the announcer’s / binoculars.” The poem evokes a nonlinear sense of time, as if horse and rider were moving forward and backward in the same moment.
The unsettling experience of listening to oneself recorded years ago informs “B-sides:”
You were the cough that struck the cadence,
fourth take, erased, then record until warped
and drowsy, like the basement demos I can’t
rewind without severing. But I do because
who wouldn’t?
These tapes contain unintentional interruptions: “a voicemail of your mom confronting God,” as well as the awkward outbursts of a younger self: “those duets you screamed // with yourself” in a “grainy falsetto,” “tangled encores.” The poet cringes—“the music gets mangled … // A threnody to be / continued,” but gives in to a peculiar tenderness, “as if / the low fidelity of your stereo tremors // would feed us back into our bodies.” “B-sides” reminds us that the traces we leave behind will return to haunt us in the most unexpected ways.
In a similar vein, emotional extremes dictate “Smoke Stacks,” a poem poised between love’s highs and lows. Weeden compares “the soul of complacent / sadness” to “loopy when we met.” The question “But is it smoke or love that stunts // our growth?” is not rhetorical. Rather, it’s meant to kindle a response in the reader, who, confronted with this quandary, must choose. Love distorts, creating a veil like the pollution of smoke, “stacks that shaped and spread the clouds, // that changed the color of meteors / from streaks unseen to grenadine horses.” The “stacks” are constructions of smoke, screens that hide reality, “an elaborate sabotage / faded black with fire.”
Smoke is not the only thing that obscures. “Crevices” resonates with a traveling salesman’s wisdom, born of brief encounters in the homes of potential customers. Hawking “a vacuum from the Buick trunk or bibles,” these encounters sharpen his eye for the inauthentic: “After a while he figured it’s the cleanest houses that / have something to hide.”
This father has his own secrets, things he’d rather keep hidden, especially from his inquisitive son, who watches the lengths his father goes to earn a living, “his wrinkled maps draped across / the passenger seat,” then returning, “road-weary, under quota, sipping something strong / on the driveway, a music box on my pillow.” The son detects that all is not well below the surface, and that the truth lies in the crevices referred to in the poem’s title, as his father’s fanatic devotion to taking care of his shoes demonstrates, as if they were talismans: “he rubbed the haze from the oxfords, / three coats,” even though, as the son observes, “you can’t buff it all / out.” More is sensed than said; “empty polish tins rattling” wake the son: “sleepless walker, a night crawler / feeling for crevices … You can’t buff it all / out.”
At the heart of the book, “Freezer Burn,” a multiple-page prose poem/flash nonfiction essay, recalls a time of getting by on the barest of means: “all those seasons we ate to kill the hunger pains, living in that closet above a laundromat with the slanted beams and spirits in the radiator.” Weeden describes an existence short on necessities but infused with a persistent dream: “I’d try to sell my words to fit in perfect columns … And you’d lug that cello from corner to corner, performing your sonatas next to a man who better identified as a statue.” Here are the street performers, the gig workers, and the dreamers, surviving on the gleanings of “days-old bread, instant noodles, anything about to expire.” More than anything, the poem focuses on food, or what a hungry person will accept as such: “oatmeal sludge,” “stumps and rinds,” “bruised produce.”
Looking back, the speaker acknowledges that “stability’s an uneven table, a feast without an appetite.” The meals he eats now lack the audacity of those from that hungry time. After all, he asks, “if you are not soaked or famished or both after the thaw, then what is it you still starve for?”
That sense of something lost for every step forward is echoed in “The Arsonist’s Daughter.” The poem begins, “What will burn will burn because it can. / Not because it should.” The arsonist lurks nearby, with his “butane breath, / his magic and gasoline,” his presence a warning: “if seduction inspires / the first breath of a flame then whatever’s / still left standing does not speak the language / of oxygen.” Although he self-immolates, the survivors are left with no choice but to build “a raft from burnt matchsticks,” “to preserve the novelty / of longing,” and to look back in horrified wonder at the “the art of self / combustion.” What is left, the poem asks, when the fire goes out?
the ice stayed but the water left charts a new path into everyday life, dissecting it into its atomic parts. As we read, we discover how extraordinary this world is, how vital each of its various parts. Chad Weeden looks around him with the eye of a photographer. By focusing on the emotional truths in a single image, he shows us what it means to be alive.
