The Jump

While stars have paparazzi, there are compensations. There are no amends for friends whose prehensile recognition of someone else’s difference aims at putting an end to it before it’s too late and they have won the Nobel prize. Of course, we’d all rather stay cozily in front of the fire, not rock the boat of juvenile identity, not jump outside the safety of our limbs, rot as they may.

Looking back, of course, we see that we were going the wrong way on the Poseidon, that we were tied to a dying tree. What we might have become! And so we never forgive those who outgrow us, who change their umbilical solutions, because we never forgive ourselves for not having done the same.

As a poet, there are no rewards at all in being unusual, bookish, secretive, cloistered, weird, except knowing for a day or two that you’ve written, or rewritten, a good poem, after which the feeling fades, and must be quickly replicated.

You are thus enormously vulnerable to the standard taunts of playpen pals, reserved for those who have mastered incoherent disciplines, such as climbing out of the sandbox.

Unlike captains of industry, for poets, living well is not an option. The only revenge is replacing the stadium lights of immediate gratification with the dim shadow of posterity, throwing yourself off your limb to make fodder for future leaves.

And so I urge denigrated artists to record the sly innuendoes, the distant digs, the slow-burning envy of their so-called peers, that posterity will laugh along with us at the vast incomprehension, petty emails, jocular ignorance, and repressed suspicions of the dead-end kids who scatter our sandcastles. Because every day we, unsuccessful by profession, admit it, and dare, weak, dying, unpopular, to fall, like autumn leaves, and so to start, amid the jeers of squirrels, the inexorable grinding of the gears, the pulverizing winter, and, extruded through it, the spring.

Like characters in The Magic Flute, we risk the rituals of silence to produce, in the end, our own music.