Matt Pond PA‘s The State Of Gold is of a piece with the singer/songwriter’s previous work in its tension between plaintive longing and earnest a ffirmations. Paradoxically, it’s a confident album about having doubts; it looks outward as well as inward. Pond will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on him.
Pond: If you’re in a loud bar and you mention that you like poetry to the beautiful woman you’ve met at the jukebox, she will do anything to escape. She will listen to the bellyaches of the flatulent doorman. She will do shots with the ranting psycho killer standing next to you. She will start a conversation with a barstool. Poetry is the lonely realm within which I attempt to write. I want to be able to be interpreted in multiple ways. While I love Bruce Springsteen, I don’t want to write about fictitious Marys and their screen-door slams—I want to write about molecular threads between us all. “Some Trees” kills me. It’s like a worded GIF I can stare at until the end of time. And I’m OK with the fact that nobody will ever love me for it.
“Some Trees”
“These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.”
Video after the jump.
