PREFATORY NOTE
Conjunctions celebrates the eightieth birthday of one of America’s most distinctive writers with the first complete version of a long poem Alexander Theroux has been developing for decades. Originally intended for his unpublished Godfather Drosselmeier’s Tears and Other Poems, for which his friend Edward Gorey created the striking cover above, this Browningesque meditation is an apologia pro vita sua/ars poetica by way of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker fable, with Theroux in the role of the mysterious Drosselmeier. A considerably shorter version appeared in his Collected Poems in 2015, but since then Theroux has expanded it twofold as he continued to brood on his writing career, his aspirations, and his place in the literary landscape.
“But, dear God, please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it.”
—Flannery O’Connor, in prayer
I who knew it badly wrong to quit a venture
when it became routine knew I would do what Noël Coward would,
like any neutral, yawning Laodicean,
and so big God, tall and eye-patched to avoid
having to watch my incorrigible fears and boiseried corruptions,
disordered, corrupt, larboard-leaning,
opened no goatbag of shiny gifts to me,
lest by pride and vanity I falsify the Scriptural pages I thumbed,
no wiser than a blunt-muzzled capybara,
figuring if Absalom was the handsomest
man in the Bible I would settle to be a knave of hearts, anything
remotely blessed, a squire with fox-red hair,
say, some pomeroy in a stiff collar and tie
allowed to arrive at some small certainty, raise an eyebrow or two,
not necessarily invent the wheel,
prove, for all my workaday baseness,
that I merely be not fooled in this life, penalized by commonness,
be no feeble houseguest on this earth,
even if no apostle, a fool but a fool
to make a difference, somehow, to rise above the life I was handed,
some bravo to frivol with a little fire.
Tinfoil-hat alert: I asked God for more,
sharpening my quills and gathering reams of paper to write books
as an antidote to all I was not!
I grew up in the gabby anarchy
of a big family with lots of brothers and sisters. We fishfiddled
into our teens like common beagles,
barking for food, playing out fate,
although for all stages of amazement I fixed predominantly on
my bewildering childhood,
until I could take it no more, seeing
finally by way of my heartless siblings evil was not a problem
to be solved but a fate to be endured.
I hadn’t the privilege of certainty,
that effortless sense of privilege born out of wealth
and what is referred to as high breeding,
but convictions I had, a luminescence close
to genius, my mind no fish-paste factory with a slubbering
floor of dead smelts, cod, red porgies.
I sat in vile beuglants over notebooks,
smoked green pot for the scenic comfort of vegetable television,
and filled pages with nutty screed.
A work of art offers itself to everyone
but belongs finally to no one, according to Baudelaire. It gives
itself away indiscriminately in the way
any two-act ballet belongs to any boob
perched in any seat in any row in any theater he claims, and I
secretly hoped that art and love, partaking
of the same self-surpassing generosity
through which God gives himself to the world, might find me
worthy who would also co-create.
Wasn’t I competent enough to count,
show God I was not just another queer quidnunc in this world
a stupid chew toy, a right prat?
I who in my searches was able to discern
terpsichorean warp in a thunderstorm, scarlet-eyed cvoirths
among angels, maleks, and messengers,
sought God by joining the holy Trappists
where I made jelly, sewed chasubles, fed fat chewing sheep,
chanted under naves many a “Te Deum.”
Had I adequate faith? For St. Augustine
the recovered self is in all matters, a renewed transcended self
which explains how he could recall
his sinning self without sinning again
by his working memory. I worked to recognize the past
for continuity to some future, shining.
A river cut through every duplicity in life
that promised Jesus’s endless substitutionary love for me,
faith I have never lost or relinquished.
Inevitably, I was a recusant, defiant,
objecting to any other authority and its mutt-like face,
a credulous Papist unbudgeable.
No need in me was close to as deep
as my nightmares, making me the bed-wetter I became
who avoided waking up to reality,
diving into the depth of sleep, fleeing
what awaited me awake, accusations of me being me.
So many of the things that I ran to
were explained by the things I ran from,
my fears becoming a kleptopredator who stole my mind
and then proceeded to devour me, too
I regarded any praise as unsaid, inconfident
of my true place in life, my mind a big neep of hesitations
my wishes tall but rare as fields of blewits.
Didn’t Leonardo tell us a man could
fit inside a square and a circle both? I searched to find
where I might connect, attach, unite.
Was it so haughty of me to need
to interpret my own life as other than a formulated creature,
the product of a worthy syndrome,
lest in my own charmless eyes
I become objectionable to the very me parading the black halls
my pedestrian self walked?
I sought to write pages to be loved,
preaching through personae, rare odd multi-voiced puppetry
masks that grinned and groaned
through whatever infamy narratives
that might outlast me lest love be locked out. So was I too odd
to succeed on this scary planet?
Couldn’t others see I had a stage mind,
nearly photographic recall, selves to share? In dreams I anticipated
coming perspectives of development.
