The Best Minds
An obvious point: if most
of what they write is vain,
timid, *pompier, would I *want
to hang out with them? And if they’re
all there is, then where are
those prescient and heroic lords of art
whom I knew, at fourteen, would adopt me?
Amidst what she will soon describe
as flashbulbs (there are no more flashbulbs),
the head of our department blinks forward
and reads five new poems about her parents
and makes a few remarks about remarks
and accepts the award. She’s what there is.
An obvious point, but I missed it.
*There are no revelations*,
said Jacobson; *everything’s there
from the beginning*. But you keep it
under wraps from yourself, so that the realization,
when you stage it at last, has the forcefulness
of youth, i.e., of youthful disillusion,
and the question, *What do I hope for?* is one
you might have asked then.
With difficulties including no money,
Leopardi, poet of infinity,
the infinite withdrawal
of the love-object, and the vanishing-point,
escaped his arch-reactionary
home and home-town and went to Rome.
There the tables of wits and philosophers
he had believed in, educating himself
with illicit volumes and a single candle,
existed but were never filled
except with intrigue, spitefulness, contempt.
And by now he had become, no doubt,
uningratiating, prickly.
Later, unable to get warm,
he lived in overheated rooms,
with few visitors, fewer friends,
still fewer who remembered not
to pet, for luck, his hunched back.
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