Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
————————–——Randall Jarrell
They’re a version of reality vs. appearance,
Of what consoles you vs. what you believe is true.
I don’t know which is which or what they mean,
For while my feelings for them are real, what confuses me
Is their expression, or what they try to say to you. I listen to myself
All the time, and other people too, and to you Diane most of all,
And yet I can’t keep all of them in focus as my sense of what I am
Keeps changing from the world in its entirety to the smallest part of it.
I don’t know whether other people have this sense of self that I do
Or talk to themselves this way, but I’m tired of the voice I recognize as mine.
Sometimes I think my privacy is real, sometimes I think it’s an illusion.
Sometimes I think my only consolation is myself, sometimes I think
It’s only other people, and that without them I don’t actually exist at all.
Instead of something equal to experience and true, the poetry of consolation
Seems like a dream deferred, a “perpetual possibility” on the verge
Of saying something I understand, before it lapses into words.
The sense that what you are remains unsaid, that what you say
Is never what you mean; the conviction that instead of truth
What makes you real is something impossible to explain—
These platitudes sound like postulates of consciousness, and tired,
And yet I can’t imagine life without them. I try to tell myself
They’re merely casts of mind and that there’s nothing to explain,
And yet I don’t believe it. The sense I have of life is of a long “and yet,”
A back and forth between those moments of satisfaction and regret
That constitute the ordinary days of simply living in the world
And waiting for the future to begin, as I’ve been waiting all my life.
Why isn’t that enough? The consolation that experience provides
Is one of just being alive, like the song we heard in Company last week.
I know I keep on talking about the same ideas and people, e.g., Wittgenstein,
Who kept inveighing against privacy while inhabiting its shade. I say these things
To entertain their opposites, as though those second thoughts might finally
Add up to something real I’ve made that doesn’t stand for anything.
What does consolation mean without eternity, paradise, or God?
If it isn’t myself, the world, or other people, what else could it be?
I love things as they are, even when I don’t. I loved being with you
In New York last week despite the bickering, or even because of it,
And yet (there I go) it didn’t feel like much at all while we were there.
If consolation is contentment with the here and now, maybe it isn’t real,
And what matters is what’s over or to come, recollections or daydreams.
To see things as they are should be enough, but what if “real” is all they are,
And privacy is all we have? Sometimes I think I’d rather be deluded
Than dissatisfied, even if it means pretending none of that is true—
But then privacy takes over, the world seems beside the point
And I lose my sense of things, even of you. I guess it’s what we are,
As if what makes us human makes us solitary too. I wish I knew
What it is to be alive and not alone and to forget myself, but I don’t,
At least not yet—those other ways of being in the world feel too
Down to earth for me to understand, let alone inhabit. And yet…
John Koethe’s most recent books are Beyond Belief (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity and Truth (Bloomsbury). The poems in this issue will be included in the forthcoming Cemeteries and Galaxies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Photo obtained from Unsplash+.
