Austerity
If you find yourself buying too many books
of poetry,
try this. Don't just
say no, not simply or unequivocally
no. Instead remember
a half-forgotten poet,
published by some long-defunct small press
(that started with such hopes and such
a lucid manifesto
in Newark, was it? or Sausalito?). You
don't even have to remember
his name. Only,
when you encounter
too crabbedly allusive or prolonged
an elegy for dysfunctional
life, remind or convince yourself: he
was better. He never thought
he was the center, or demanded praise
or pity for
not being. And when distressed
by convictions
shoehorned into the worldview
of therapy, recall his pithiness.
It isn't necessary to know
specific lines or titles, merely that he
was smarter, wiser, gentler, more full
of life, more detached,
crueler, as well as so prescient that
you're not missing anything
as you slide the new volume back
into the poetry rack
and take the escalator down, and walk
past birthday cards, remainders, bestsellers, and out.
Be careful, however,
not to epiphanize:
you wrote his poems, or should have, or will.
That time is past,
like youth, like existentialism, the whole damn thing.
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