Poem of the Month

I have been fighting all my life, and losing it seems. Against the force of my own gravity. I want to succumb to it, but as low as it may pull me down, it won’t kill me. So I succumb only sporadically, as it is better to swim against your anchors while your head is still above water

Once I was eager to seem to know. Now I am eager to know. And as I piece together what is true, I see it is different and more horrible than I imagined.

There is a breath in me that blows and one day it will be put out. Until then, what scents and sounds wave on this wind? It seems to come up from the ground, or down from the sky. It created me. I am the collected echoes on a breeze that swirl for a moment against a rock face, then vanishes.

If this is true, why such angry noises? Why such a violent twist to the air? Why should something so ephemeral be so severe?

I wait in the wings for some sign on life. I have no ideas, but ideas have me. My mind is undisciplined, sporadic, unwieldy. It cannot hold an image on its alter, nor a word, nor a clear memory for more than seconds. It is not still and like an unhappy 12 year old, fidgets at the table and makes everyone else miserable.

But what I find is that when I slow down the movements of mind, and embrace the melancholy that follows me from New York to Pennsylvania to Florida to France, then find that I enjoy my heaviness, as Kierkegaard’s narrator in Diapsalmata does.

This is what I have been fighting my whole time in Europe: melancholy. As if it weren’t invented here! My loneliness is epic, my self-reproach pervasive. I see an old love who I haven’t thought of in years and suddenly am full of loss and remorse. I see all the men who might love me backing away into darkness, like Orpheus at his fateful turn to Eurydice. And it feels as fateful, as severe.

But unlike Eliot’s Prufrock: modern man is his quiet desperation, reaching for a connection to grandeur that cannot come, I reach the mystical and grand through the depth of my reflective melancholy. And so I do think, in this state, the mermaids would sing to me.

So, perhaps epic melancholy and remorse can win us back our conference with the gods? After all, transcendent happiness is fleeting. But transcendent melancholy: that can last you a whole lifetime.

-Nina Alvarez