RILKE WROTE in a letter, “The life of great men is a road bristling with thorns, for they are utterly dedicated to their art. Their own life is like an atrophied organ for which they have no further use.” Is it possible for a writer to love words more than life, I wonder? I don’t want my life to be an atrophied organ. I don’t want to be sidetracked from my dreams, like my father who enlisted as a soldier to escape the life of a sharecropper. Striving to assemble language into art, I don’t have an agenda for poetry, though I believe that too much skill can be boring in art.
A knack for writing verse doesn’t necessarily make one a good poet. What defines a poet is a certain universal quality that entails being attuned to the secret vibrations of the world; this does not always include a gift for versification, which is an aptitude practiced by many who are not truly poets.
James Lord was—to me—a remarkable man whose life did not become atrophied, though his friends found him secretive and devious. He grasped the complex nature of artistic inspiration. He was cultivated without being a snob because he did not see the world hierarchically. There are drawings of him by the willfully enigmatic Balthus, whom he visited at his home, Château de Chassy, in Burgundy, where the sketches were completed—the first in fifteen or twenty minutes, then a second and a third, the final portrait, according to James, “decidedly the best.” “Well, now, my dear Jim, we shall have our little session of posing, shall we not?” Balthus had said to him when he came down from his studio carrying a large sketchbook and a handful of pencils. “Just sit in that armchair and face me. Good. Like that. And lower your head.” James thought that the sketches were among Balthus’s finest portrait drawings, and when he was leaving the château, Balthus told him, “You came all this way to pose for me, and I’ve very, very rarely done drawings of men. So it’s really I who owe you a favor. You must take all three and be on your way.” It was as if the drawings were a record not just of James’s youthful profile but also of the courteous nobleman Balthus’s revelation of something within himself, resulting from James’s intrusion into his solitary existence. “Balthus was a loner,” James insisted, a lordly, romantic loner, “who thought of the artist as a heroic, mythic figure.”
THE FIRST TIME I came to Paris, I was a little boy, and the memories I have come from my family’s Super 8 movies. In one, we are on a tour boat on the Seine, and I am seated next to my handsome father, who is wearing a summer suit with a white shirt buttoned at his throat. He is looking downward pensively. I am wearing a zippered gray jacket and squinting in the sunlight toward the camera. My older brother stands behind us with a sullen face. Death, fear, dream, and poetry are far away from the little boy I am. At the age of three, do I even have a self ? If so, how I must be striving to not be annihilated by Paris, which I find so overwhelming. My face looks solitary and calm. Behind us, the Seine is dark, reflecting the sunlight like a black mirror, instead of the murky gray water I crisscross in my comings and goings each day. The statues, parks, churches, fountains, and monuments await my young family and me. What perplexing messages memories can yield. As I write this, their odors, their shadows, and their sweet music are almost too much to bear.
Part XIII
SOMETIMES ROSES—especially the velvety crimson ones, with red-bronze leaves—remind me of the 1980s, when I lived in New York City during the AIDS epidemic. They make me remember chaos and fear in connection with the symptoms—fevers, chills, headaches, diarrhea, swollen glands, muscular aches, fatigue, weight loss, thrush, insomnia, and the lesions, which, like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, bore a stigma.
But the neat, perfectly formed, soft-domed roses also remind me of hybrid vigor, or heterosis, a term used in genetics. Hybrid vigor hypothesizes that crossbred plants, animals, and humans are genetically superior to their parents, since weak, undesirable, deleterious, recessive genes, which might be harmful, are suppressed. Hybrid vigor can fortify a voluptuous rose’s seventy small petals against beetles and disease, just as it can fortify and strengthen a man or a woman against the effects of an incurable virus.
And sometimes, pressing my nose into the dark-crimson button eye of a rose, I think of Black Saturday and the weird, frightening stigmata of Christ. On Black Saturday, the day before Easter, the “Harrowing of Hell” is said to have occurred, and Jesus descended into the underworld to visit the realm of the dead and to rescue the good men and women held captive there, not unlike the poet Orpheus seeking his beloved Eurydice.
WHEN I WRITE about flowers, I think I am trying to find out what I really feel, so there are digressions and sometimes incoherence. But flowers open me up and smash the water that is frozen inside me. As John Ashbery says, “We are all confessional poets sometimes. That is, we sometimes write about our personal experiences. And there should be no stigma attached to this.” In French, the word rose (from the Latin rosa) means both the woody perennial and the color pink. In Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful unpublished draft “Vague Poem,” she is smashed open, too, while playing with the confusion between rock roses and rose-rock quartz. The fragment concludes, euphorically, with an intimate and erotic chant affirming
