By Matt Hart

but error number one was mistyping “gin”
as “gun.” For the record, I do not like guns,
not even water pistols—especially not
water pistols—but that’s another matter
and not at all germane to the aesthetics
of my judgment about this gin,
which is literally a matter of taste.
Error number two: somebody described
the Hendricks Midsummer Solstice gin
I’m tasting now as flirtatious. I don’t know
what that means, except in the sense
that most alcohol dulls one’s senses
in a seductive way that makes one desire
more of it, until soon enough one finds oneself
drunk. Baudelaire was always drunk.
Apollinaire was drunk on stars.
Someone tasted a liquor never brewed, but
I don’t remember who and refuse
to look it up. I defuse, too, the catheterization
of catharsis. Those are errors three, four,
and five. Now I’m on my errors tour. From here,
let’s assume that drinking is a bad idea,
so always a mistake, and I can stop
numbering the issues and clear the air
of the word “error.” Always lean in
to the initial first impulse and the debacle
of the intellect, which is poetry
according to André Breton. Beauty will be
convulsive or not be at all, he also said
after drinking a shot of gun. I mean gin—
again, my mistake, stupid fingers. Some people die
from drink, including, I assume, from drinking
gin. Others die as firemen. A few people even die
as astronauts, but most people just die.
My maudlin-ness, here, a result of the floral notes,
the herbaceous caliginous, facticity of the factotum.
Obviously, I don’t even know what
some of those words mean . . . anymore . . . if
I ever did, but the thing is, as with guns,
I don’t really like gin, but until recently
I also didn’t like The Grateful Dead.
Then I heard that song “Box of Rain.” Now
I still don’t like The Grateful Dead, but
that song is convulsive if anything is, and thus,
beautiful, so maybe there’s still hope for me
and at least one kind of gin. Apparently,
Phil Lesh, bassist and occasional lead vocalist
for The Grateful Dead, wrote “Box of Rain”
for his father who was dying. I am a sucker
for the elegiac, I just wrote to somebody
the other day in a text. But Lesh was
also known for playing a six-string bass
and no one should ever play a six-string bass.
That’s about four strings too many. Why
I apparently associate gin with death is
somewhat inexplicable, since it obviously hasn’t
killed me, but it most certainly has something to do
with the “i” and the “u” being right next to each other
on the keyboard—thus creating the gun/gin
phenomenon or paradox or conundrum—and also
it has to do with the fact that “I” and “you”,
however close we are, are always significantly
separate from each other in time and space.
As human beings, there is an unmitigable distance
between us, which is part of what makes us
unique. Even if we were to be somehow
right on top of each other, we could never be
each other, nor feel each other’s feelings
except in an imaginative empathetic way.
It’s the sort of thing one tries to get to, or
to achieve, in poetry and drunkenness and
being on top of each other. But in reality,
we are always at a loss when it comes
to other people, the feelings they feel,
the deeper meanings of their words.
We lose and lose and lose throughout our lives,
until eventually we ourselves are lost to others.
Beyond that is the Beyond that no one knows,
an eternity of not-ness. At least
that’s what I suppose. And while that’s
a rather complicated web of associations,
it may help to illustrate the reasons
I associate gin with death. Were you still even cognizant
that that’s what I was doing? Have another drink.
In the short term at least, you’ll feel lighter.
The Hendricks Midsummer Solstice gin,
in particular, when one first tastes it, is a high point
with regard to lightness, though I’m sure
with each subsequent drink and every day after
it will be a little less. And you and I, too,
will be a little less—a little more occluded
in the darkness of what’s next, which is why
to arm myself against it, I misspell “gin” as “gun”
nearly every chance I get and why I don’t
drink gun unless I’m forced to at ginpoint.

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Matt Hart is the author of twelve books of poetry, including most recently Falling Fine: Selected and New Poems (Ledge Mule Press/Pickpocket Books, 2024). The Head of Creative Writing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, he plays in the post-punk/indie-rock band NEVERNEW and edits, solders, and publishes the poetry journal Solid State.