I wish I were happy in a disciplined way. Happy in a nondespairing way. I wish that I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I'm not sure I can. I've published poems, yes. That much is beyond question. And for a while I was pleased with the poems that I published. I felt that I understood why people write poetry. I understood the whole communal activity of writing and reviewing and extracting quotes to go on the paperback. "Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery." Being part of the interfaith blurb universe.
And now it's like I'm on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way old aluminum ladders have that texture, that kind of not-too-appealing roughness of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I'm clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don't know how I got here. It's a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing, rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham, I see Billy Collins, I see Ted Kooser. They're all clinging to the ladder, too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up there. Samuel Daniel. Sara Teasdale. Herrick. Tiny figures, clambering, clinging. The wind comes over, whssssew, and it's cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up. Off to one side there's Helen Vendler, in her trusty dirigible, filming our ascent. And I look down, and there are many people behind me. They're hurrying up to where I am. They're twenty-three-year-old energetic climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I'm trying to keep climbing. But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It's freezing, and it's lonely, and there's nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just-fffshhhooooow. Let go.
Would that be such a bad thing?
I RAN OVER A ROCK with the lawnmower, now my lawn-mower is broken. It doesn't start and I've bent the propeller shaft, which is something I can't fix, so that's two hundred dollars to the repair place, where they also sell baby chickens. And bags of chickenfeed. All this money is being swept from me. A faint breath of money somehow appears, a mist of money. I breathe it out into the air, and immediately it's sucked away by those who have entered into elaborate agreements with me that I haven't read.
I can do five chin-ups now, and I'm going to be helping my friend Tim out with painting his house. He's putting in a new door in back and painting the whole house a deep blue-black, and I'm going to make maybe fifteen hundred dollars helping him scrape and paint. Which means I'll be fine for next month, financially. He says that Haffner College won't have me back to teach writing. They are so right not to have me back.
Elizabeth Bishop wrote: "I am so sick of Poetry as Big Business I don't know what to do." None of the good poets believed in teaching. Auden said it was dangerous. Philip Larkin said that when you start paying people to write poems and paying people to read them you remove the "element of compulsive contact." Too bad Larkin's poems are so killingly down-bringing. I can't bear Larkin, not because he isn't a very good poet-he is a very good poet-but because anytime I get anywhere near him it's poison, I don't want to go on living. His acid is just too corrosive. I can't read his poems, but I can remember reading them with amazed undelight whenever I read his prose. So his poetry is still working on me indirectly.
Late in the afternoon I was talking to Tim on the phone about Queen Victoria when I heard a huge buzzing in the window. I said, "Tim, excuse me, I've got to go investigate this huge buzzing insect." I hung up and looked at it.
It was a waspy sort of creature with a long tubular abdomen that carried a herringbone pattern in yellow. Something that resembled a hypodermic syringe poked out its back end. I called Roz right away. I said, "I'm sorry to bother you, but remember that insect that you told me about once with the long herringbone abdomen?"
"Yes," she said.
I said, "It's on the windowsill in the dining room. It's got a huge long pointy thing hanging off its end and the point has snagged a strand of dust and it is so big that at first glance I thought it was two wasps mating."
"I know that one," she said.
"Do you know what it's called? I was thinking of writing something about it."
"Let me check," Roz said. She got her copy of the Audubon guide to New England bugs and birds and miscellaneous other things-the one with the frightening picture of the star-nosed mole-a book that used to lie on a little rusty table on our porch and now she has it, because it's her book. She had the happy sound in her voice that I remember from when she looks things up, a sound of optimism and soon-to-be-satisfied curiosity.
"Yes, here it is," she said after a minute. "It's called a 'pigeon horntail.' Here's what it says. 'Female has long ovipositor.' "
"That's for sure," I said.
"It says the ovipositor 'deposits eggs deep into wood that larvae eat.' So you should probably take it out of the house because it wants to lay eggs that will eat the window-sill."
I thanked her and got a glass and a mailing envelope and scooted the soi-disant pigeon horntail into captivity. It buzzed, but it was tired from its struggle with the window dust. I walked with it down to the old lilac tree and let it go there. It could probably insert its ovipositor into one of the dead lilac branches. Roz once showed me something about old lilac wood: it has a streak of purple deep inside, as if it soaks some of the purpleness of the blossoms back into itself when they go.
I'M BACK from the reading in Cambridge. I "gave" the reading. Beforehand I took Smacko for a long walk, all the way to the salt pile and back, nodding and smiling at passersby, practicing being a public person. I washed out his water bowl very carefully so that all the invisible slime was gone, and I filled it with cold water while he panted, and I listened to him drink it. His collar clanked coolly against the brim. Then I drove to Cambridge.
As I drove I tried to do everything very gracefully. At the tollbooth I fished my wallet out of my pocket and turned it over and opened it very gracefully, and I used just my thumb to lift a twenty out of its pouchy slumber. And when the toll-taker gave me back my change, I slid it into the change nook with practiced smoothness. I tore open a bag of vinegar-flavored potato chips and fished out one of them and turned it and touched my tongue to it, and drew it in without a sound. I sipped some coffee, and I looked to my left with an easy swivel, to see what kind of car was passing me. It was a blue Dodge Magnum-I forgave it with the gentlest of nods for being a big, arrogant car. Then I folded up the receipt for the coffee and potato chips and put it in my pocket with an extreme fluidity of gesture. And when I pushed the turn signal, I didn't click it all the way, but just held it with two fingers so that the circuit completed and it went click click, and then I released it. I turned on the CD player and listened to Carl Sandburg read aloud two lines of one of his poems and then I turned it off, with the subtlest pressure on the off button. I had the touch. I was good at what I did. And what I did was drive to poetry readings.
I found a place to park, and I was on time, and the bookstore manager waited until there was a good crowd-twelve people, I think, maybe thirteen, including several bookstore employees, who were kind people who didn't dwell on the fact that their bookstore was going broke. I read some poems into the brightly lit corner of the store, including a new version of the one about Roz's white pants, and they didn't sound too bad as I read them. The cash register began printing its noisy nightly transaction summary just as I was finishing "How I Keep from Laughing," which kind of wrecked it, but that's all right.