new yorker poem #5

It feels so good to write, she
said, it’s like a second childhood
to be confronted by an empty page.
A troubadour, an indistinct
meager notion, cheap china figurines
and formal rooms, whose architecture
dictates within narrow parameters.
Now is the time to act. Before the turds
of your endurance disappear forever.
Don’t wear out your welcome. To the
fidelity of transposal, Nabokov said,
I have sacrificed everything: elegance,
euphony, clarity, good taste, modern
usage and even grammar. One assumes
the rather vacant, slapdash mood
is intentional. This life of mine
suffered from an excess of design.
I had to live through it to know that
the memory of pain can be a painkiller.
The will to believe is universal, but this
is Californian: faith boiled down to fad.
An American volunteer carries himself
through revolution in the self-conscious
poise of a lonely matador in the ring.
It is vital to be able to laugh at oneself,
the tragic flaw of many writers
is to laugh at the wrong thing.
When she cracks she cracks quickly
and almost noiselessly, like a teacup.
Time would gather up the ends,
see to it that honoring of a memory
was love that mattered also...