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10/16/08 - (2)
An Old Joke
When I was young, a neophyte of a poet, I would delude myself That my life's chief mission, its happiest preoccupation, Was to make sense out of the world's complexities, Probe the universe, with my free verse, Impose order on the cosmos, And, in the process, out of the mix, fix my location, know myself.
Oh, those were the callow, halcyon, carefree seasons, Those academic days of rigorous immersion in the masters — Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats — When I fashioned myself a budding minstrel, bard, Traipsing across my ever-expanding imagination, In search of my destiny's Romantic identity, A writer of sublime lyrics conceived to outlast the generations of man.
Forty-five years after those initial epiphanies of sheer exuberance, When poems exploded off the tip of my pen's tongue, Like shooting stars parting the cold darkness, If I've learned anything at all, of consequence, It could be that not even the greatest Platonists, Shakespeareans, Let alone I, ultimately, Have ever made sense out of existence's disarray,
Analyzed mortality sufficiently, to immunize it against death, Created a panacea out of mere words, Capable of forestalling the body's inevitable degradation. And so it is, this unexceptional Thursday night, Sitting by myself, isolated in my doomed disillusion, Composing in the shadows of Yeats, Shapiro, Roethke, Plath, I finally realize that a writer is just an old joke told on himself.
10/16/08 - (2)
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