A Stack of Poems

I discovered a file of poems I’d kept in London, around 150 pages, and went through it, convinced I’d find things which never made it into the computer. And they were there, and they were worth finding. I’m not sure I would have had the tolerance for it when I was younger. Now that I’m older I find such drab, exhilarating days inevitable.

A young friend of ours had never really worked. She came up with a theory that she shouldn’t get a job, because it wouldn’t pay enough, and it wouldn’t lead anywhere.

I thought that that was enough to discourage anyone from doing anything. No one begins where they’d like to end up. How could I write a halfway decent poem if I hadn’t been trying to do it since I was 30? There’s barely enough time to write one good poem in an entire lifetime, so it seems wrong to throw away that one poem because you don’t want to write lesser poems for thirty years.

That’s the price of a good poem.

I’m reminded of the koan where an art lover asks a great artist for a drawing of a fish. Each year the artist says the painting isn’t ready. Finally, at the end of his life, the connoisseur becomes impatient and demands the painting.

The artist dashes off the painting in a minute and hands it to the irate patron. “You could have done this at any time!” he yells.

“Ah,” says the artist. “But it was the work of a lifetime.” And he opens a closet and a thousand paintings of fish fall out.