Thread Count

There are lives lived in miniature, those of the unnoticed, the unloved, the anachronistic—lives of the poor, the gifted, the eccentric—which pale under scrutiny, which disintegrate with success, which cannot endure prime time, fame, or the energy it takes to maintain a significant position in commerce or society in general, people like Oblomov, or any hero in Gogol, ornate aesthetes whose pose will not sustain comment, poets whose delicate conceits wilt in daylight, musicians whose nerves and very identities shatter on stage (see The Himalaya Sessions).

Buying typing paper around the corner is for us creatures of the carrel a kind of battle, a struggle with strangers and sidewalks, our fragile identities threatened by every raised eyelid and baleful stare (the status quo in Paris). But at the other end of the elevator’s magic mirror is the waiting, cosseting silence of the writing desk, the muffling drapes, the love of our poor, inanimate, but personal objects, the answering machine’s butlery buffer. The elevator opens onto the blank page, the future, a balcony overlooking an imaginary cinematic kingdom of misty valleys and rainbowed waterfalls, much like Princess Padme Amidala overlooking Naboo, Lewis’s Narnia, Poul Anderson’s Tharixan in his 1960 novel The High Crusade, or James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

The poem emerges as the poet does, through struggle, through the ascending elevator, through a quiet place.

Clothes have threads, while paper has rag content. So paper clothes a poem, even if in rags.

I hope I can borrow Irving Mellish briefly from Woody Allen.

A relative of ours had just gone through breast cancer, and I was thinking of her also, ascending I hope out of the dark that each of us has to face in different ways.