Ignis Fatuus
July 1, 2009 at 4:26 am (diary) (boys, carrying on, college, love, poems, poetry, real life, writing)
Sounds almost like an insult, doesn’t it?
Doesn’t sound like the best description for my heart I’ve yet found. Doesn’t sound like the place I go when you wonder if I’m listening to you and have your strong suspicions that I’m not. Doesn’t feel like a glow should sound.
I’m much less cohesive in purpose tonight than I’d like. Too bad, I guess. Today was interesting. The man in the hospice who apparently has been as near to the light as a moth drawn to a candle’s flame, been there as many times as he can without burning his antennae. I suppose my waxing poetic about it must have given him the ironic courage to carry on, as though hope and miracles can be gained by sheer force of will. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. I get to tell people not to expect them to return calls in a timely manner what with the dying and all. Everyone has a role, if not in the coming, then in the going of someone else.
Apropos of nothing, I’ve found my new favorite thing: the tactful kissoff. We’ll have to see how it’s regarded, but it is delightful not to have emotional millstones and albatrosses adorning my neck, or at least not this specific one. That specificity is the key. It’s funny how staid and dull and laborious faking people out can get. I get a thrill with being direct nowadays, with giving it to you straight. With telling you that you can’t get me off with a crowbar and a tractor beam. With never taking my gloves off in the act.
I was reading my college poetry book. My professor thought my writing was great, that I should pursue poetry, pursue my MFA – neither of which has happened much (I suppose this is a blog or twenty in itself) – but he wrote that he didn’t always like everything I wrote. Hmm. Still don’t know what that means. Probably he saw the same insubstantial quality of my thoughts, the way I could make silk purses out of sow’s ears, but had to fake authority. That I wrote about writing, withdrawing, relationships of coincidence and not connection, there was always this psychic distance. Perhaps this is why I’m trying now to honor the experiential at the moment, the truth.
Truth: I remember being wildly in love with him for a period back then, before, of course the semester was over for break and I found some other altar to worship at. I remember thinking he was quite appropriately tormented, perfectly clever, and absolutely lonesome. I wrote poems about…well, it’s hard to describe. It was vaguely steampunk before I knew what steampunk was. Succor and a tormented man and airship captaincy may have been themes. I have never failed to be ridiculous in my methods of lust. Venus in Sagittarius allows for this.
I remember picking the wrong poet for our little poet review – wrong in that Linda Pastan was not a poet’s poet. She is a mother. Who had to break through years of silence and drudgery and not knowing her drive to write in order to find her identity as poet. And she writes plainly, emotionally, without fifteen meanings to parse in between her lines. She wasn’t this modern, scattershot, laser-eye, cut-your-gut powerhouse poet he seemed to be and love. She told her tale with the flourishes her heart felt and not to tug at your head. I like many poets more than her, but I like few poems more than her Deathwatch Beetle which was why I picked her. I remember this professor dismissing her and somehow, me with her. As if we were from the same mold of simple, fine, pine furniture poets. Built with a grip on the fundamentals, a concept of art, but nobody’s putting us in the Louvre.
You can let so much go when there’s no pressure to find the thing inside you worthy of a gallery. Maybe I just wanted to be fawned over. I wanted to be lifted up on a pedestal for this one thing, this one gift of wordplay and an ear for euphony, this one reason that justified everything that came before. And like my mother before me, it’s not my life now, my little talent oxidizes like a farm implement left in the field. It has trouble fitting in now. And you wouldn’t have heard of either of us, my professor or me, but I might have been happier for having written. Happier than some of the days I’ve been through lately.
That’s one reason I’m here.
And I haven’t even told you about the waldorf salad and my lovely mother nd the pond and walking and everything else. You should really fall in love with me and then I’d feel obligated to catch you up.
