Collected Poems (33 page)

that being “professional” meant not picking up a brush unless a dealer promised you a show.

I knew all that was posturing, self-deception, sham; I knew from what I went through myself

how repugnant working was when you didn’t know if there was ever going to be a recompense.

I don’t mean to make light of it, what we were trying to do was hard, and not just the work,

in some ways that was easy: what was really difficult was waiting for the labor to begin;

you had to tell yourself every minute that you did it why you did and what it was for.

So little really happened, and no one but a friend or two even noticed what you were doing.

The dropout rate among us was impressive: over time so many drifted off, some to law school,

some into endless therapies; a black sculptor began to drink and disappeared into the ghetto;

someone else became an “art consultant,” choosing prints and paintings for corporate boardrooms.

It did seem easier for some, though; some were seen as having been successful from the start.

I suppose it had to do with confidence; they weren’t necessarily the ones who’d won the prizes,

but they seemed certified, legitimized, they had clues about their ultimate trajectories;

you felt they’d freed themselves from thinking they were being
watched,
those chosen few,

they were on their own and, though they hadn’t done much yet, were envied and looked up to.

What happens to those younger masters isn’t always happy; maybe that much unquestioning admiration,

that much carrying of so many other people’s hopes, even at that level, isn’t good for you.

Also, when everyone’s that young, there’s much misreading of charisma and eccentricity as talent.

Some, anyway, would turn out to have the gift, but not enough of what you could call the
cunning,

the kind of objectivity artists seem to need to keep their work evolving in meaningful ways.

They’d find a mode of doing what their gift had offered them, then stay with it too long,

and find later that they’d used it up and gotten stuck in some too flashy segment of themselves.

Others would have the cunning, and the drive it seemed to go with, but too much of it;

they’d become impatient, and move off to something close to art — usually involving money —

to which they’d bring their ingenuity and energy, becoming rich or celebrated, but so what?

She, I don’t have to say, wasn’t one of the elect, no more than I’d dare claim I was.

The other girl may have been; if so, she controlled the arrogance it sometimes went with.

The boyfriend for all we knew was a genius; we had to take his mysterious accomplishments on faith.

He was brilliant enough in conversation, at any rate, and had an attractive calm about him.

In the face of his illness, and though no one dared speak of it, his at least possible death,

the two of them had evolved one of those surprising complicities of resignation and acceptance

which can take the most unexceptional people at such times, and they were hardly unexceptional.

They had an admirably mature relationship; they respected and encouraged one another’s work,

and were solicitous towards each other in gentle, complicated ways the rest of us found heartening.

But with all that, the dignity they seemed committed to achieving now was of another order.

For one thing, there was no denial in it, no trying to behave more fittingly before the facts.

They stayed mostly to themselves, and worked; if they did go anywhere, to an opening, say,

they left early, refusing to let anything intrude on their resolute and by now ennobling composure.

The rest of us must have been a little awed; being with them was like being with a movie star.

We may have been excited, too, and secretly inspired, but all they seemed to want from us

was that we act as though nothing unusual was happening, and we were all too happy to comply.

She, though, once she’d found out about it — the girl apparently at first had kept it from her —

wasn’t taking anything so calmly, wasn’t having any of this stoicism, this holding back.

I don’t know how, but she was all at once their chum, their confidante, their social secretary.

She was blazing with consideration for them, some unsuspected energy had been released in her.

She dropped her painting altogether now, and did good deeds for them instead: she was everywhere,

organizing quiet dinners, getting people to throw parties; she even once promoted a recital,

which was supposed to give some of our musicians an opportunity to play but which she turned —

and not in an unpleasantly pretentious way — into an elegant soiree and cocktail honoring them.

They became, in fact, as she took over, the unofficial guests of honor everywhere they went.

They hardly seemed to notice, though, and to hardly notice her; she was like a stage director,

rushing back and forth behind the scenes, keeping all the action moving unobtrusively along,

except it wasn’t the audience which was supposed to be oblivious to all the cable-hauling,

the changing sets and lighting, but the innocent creatures out on the apron of the stage.

I often wondered, considering what they seemed to have wanted before she started in on that,

whether they were ever bothered by her benevolent chicanery; they didn’t appear to be.

They could have stopped her, but their sorrow may have been more oppressive than we knew;

maybe there was something that they needed after all, maybe it was just that much attention.

Or it could all have been just another factor to be balanced in their brilliant equation,

the way one of their mothers’ clutching a tissue to an irrepressible tear would have been.

If they didn’t have a problem with her machinations, though, I did; I found it all depressing.

I thought I knew what she was up to — a naked compensation for her failures at the easel —

and I began to stay away from functions she was overseeing, which meant most of them by now.

I just kept to myself more, even if it meant afflicting myself with still more loneliness,

a loneliness the opposite of what I found in books, where you went off on your holy pilgrimage,

enriched yourself with arcane meditations on the universe, and then produced your masterpiece.

My masterpiece, if I still could have a fantasy of such a thing, seemed more buried every day

beneath the layers of confusion, uncertainty, and mental maladroitness to which I was so susceptible.

I don’t remember what finally brought me to the party where I saw the three of them again.

It was just a night at someone’s house; everyone was there, I was glad to be there, too,

hearing other people’s voices, breathing other people’s breath, feeling ordinary human warmth.

The young man still looked well enough, the two of them were sitting at the piano, whispering.

She was near them; when she saw me, she came over, she was glad to see me, where had I been?

There was something she’d been wanting to ask me; no, not right now, wait, later on.

I couldn’t conceive what question she might have for me, but I’d been by myself so much

that any contact was intriguing, and besides, she looked, with her new air of purpose, quite aglow.

As the party swirled on, I watched her; it was remarkable how she’d involved herself with them.

I’d never thought of her as subtle but I had to recognize how much intelligence she had for this.

She was always near them, but never overbearingly so; she was just available to them,

they were always in a triangle with her, as though she possessed some benign, proprietary power.

She’d bring them drinks and sandwiches, lead people over to them, lean down to listen, laugh.

It seemed natural when she’d lightly touch the lover’s shoulder, or stroke the girl’s hair.

Later on, I caught her hand and led her to the bedroom; what had she been going to ask?

What she asked was if I knew anything to read on death; could I recommend a book on death.

At first I didn’t understand what she was saying, I couldn’t register it, get it down.

What?
“You’ve read a lot of books,” she said. “I need one to give to somebody who’s dying.”

She said it quietly, she was serious, almost solemn, but she was looking
at
my eyes this time.

“Something to comfort them,” she added with conspiratorial intensity, “in their ordeal.”

I don’t remember what I answered, if I did — I may have said they’re all on death, all books,

I still believed it sometimes in those days, it sometimes seemed the core of my aesthetic code.

What I’m hearing now is “Timor mortis conturbat me” — “The fear of death is killing me” —

but what I remember thinking then, with a desperate conviction, was that she’d beaten me:

she’d held her grudge this long, and then attacked, prevailed and won our little agon.

By assuming, or making believe that she assumed, I’d be so unaware of something of such moment,

she’d let me know I was an outcast among outcasts, subtracted from what society I had, a pretender,

and by turning my own medium against me, showing how absurd it would have been for me to think

that writing could heal or solace real grief, she’d proved that my pretensions were a farce.

I think I was amazed that she’d have used her own good deeds to get at me, but more importantly,

I knew she’d touched some truth, and that something in me had been undermined so profoundly

that as I turned from her, although of course I wouldn’t let her know, I must have almost staggered.

I think I doubted even then, though, how much my psychic storm really had to do with her.

I knew she didn’t hate me
that
much, and that what had happened to us wasn’t very deep.

No, it wasn’t me she’d hated and wanted vengeance from, it was
art;
I was just the medium,

a handy means to rebel against art, to degrade it, express how much she despised it.

She’d chosen me to use — and this
had
hurt — because she knew I knew I wasn’t really pure.

All my narcissism, all the juvenile self-indulgence that had let me think that as I was

I could still be an initiate in art’s exalted realm, no matter how I lied and twisted my identity,

she’d long ago intuited, and finally struck with, and she may have even guessed — I hope not —

that in this moment I was living out what in turning to a life by art I’d been trying to evade.

I don’t think I cared if she was taking satisfaction from my turmoil, she didn’t matter anymore.

I beheld myself, and I was mortified, not because of anybody else’s ideas or norms or values,

but for my own, all I’d studied and prepared for, which had suddenly become shameful to me.

“You must change your life”: I knew Rilke’s line already, now I had a hint of how it happened.

It’s not easy to remember how much of what I later came to understand revealed itself that evening:

a mass of sad intention was set under way in me I’ve spent all these years trying to enact.

Right then I was most likely struck by just the wrongness of how I’d so far conceived my task.

I’d believed that art was everything, the final resolution of all my insecurity and strivings.

Now I realized that in attempting to create a character in art, someone who would live for art,

I’d turned away from something in myself, some lapse I hadn’t glimpsed, and, more shocking still,

I knew that architecture, poetry, and painting weren’t the self-containing glories I’d imagined,

but that they, too, could have evasions lurking in them, grievous cosmic flinchings from reality.

Art wasn’t everything, nothing could be everything, but more crucially, art
needed
you:

I knew now that if you hated art, as she did, that was what you hated in it, that responsibility,

not to making up a self which might someday be worthy of ecstasy or fame, but to art itself,

to the negating force it could become unless you understood what its decisive limits were.

The power, the willed resolve I’d believed you needed for your work, I knew now were elementary,

that arduous and obscure responsibility was what mattered most, and I intuited, and
knew,

that what it consisted of was a concern, for all of us, for every human being: one by one.

The forms and substances were incidental,
we
were form and substance; subject, object, reason.

“You must change your life.” I knew then, or began to know, that what art needed at the end

was an acceptance of what’s muddled and confused in us, what’s broken by our lives and living.

To love art meant to love our errors; what we owed art was ourselves and our imperfect world.

“Timor mortis conturbat me.” “You must change your life.” I was left with my forbidding mottoes,

my attempts to overcome my unconfidence and indolence, and every day my sorry stabs at poems.

Whether I used well what I learned that night, or if it changed me, how am I to know?

Can we ever say in all good conscience we’ve really changed? We only have our single story.

In mine, the physicist, the young man, the boy — what else would I think he was by now? —

the poor boy dies sooner even than predicted; this all takes place in just some months.

The boy dies, the girlfriend moves away; I see her work reviewed, years later, in the
Times;

they loved her: she was praised especially for her “mastery of expression”: good for her.

She — how specify her now? my antagonist? my demon other? the antithesis in my groping dialectic? —

she drops from sight: I forgave her, but never heard another breath about her, and never wanted to.