Some notes on a theme.
In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, John Keats wrote, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.”
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As a child, I think I would have traded anything to be beautiful — or thought of as beautiful by others. Any talent in academics, any penchant for acting, any virtuosity in writing would be offered in my imagined Faustian bargain for more height, softer hair, immaculate teeth, and abs.
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The nerdiness of beauty, or rather its fandom, has been running like an oil slick through the rivers of my mind. I try to clean it up, get practical, get down to the business of writing poems that are urgent and useful, only to find everything blackened by beauty.
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Black, of course, is beautiful, but this week, we lost Kwame Braithwaite.
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I’ve been trying to write a second manuscript of poems, thinking, “Surely, it must get easier, because surely my sense of a beauty has improved.” Nothing has gotten easier. Beauty seems more severe somehow, and having passed the age of 40, I am now constantly thinking of Dickens’ Great Expectations.
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Black, of course, does not crack, so I have no particular fear of aging. I will not color the salt-and-pepper of my beard. I work out more for my heart than for the eye of the beholder. Nothing is as beautiful as sticking around.
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During a virtual reading, racist Zoom bombers interrupt me three times before being booted. A minor nuisance, I tell the friends who text me afterward. I’m fine, I say. I think of Toni Morrison, and I remind myself that racism wants to waste your time. Something beautiful is lost, though. Some space where the polite fictions of progress might ease a psychic vice. “I just want to trust when someone says they love my poems,” I say to no one who asks how I am doing.
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I can’t reconcile an easy myth — empathy may not be cumulative nor recursive. I imagine the Zoom bombers as children so it is easier to forgive them. I want to believe that there is still time for them to find peace and have it be a beautiful peace. But what do I know? Maybe that would be a kind of cruelty. Beauty may destroy their sense of self.
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I reread a few poems from Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband just to pass time. Or maybe to feed my obsession with titles. Or maybe because feeling lost in another writer’s lines is sublime.
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Karaoke is the occasion for a colleague’s birthday, and I text him to cancel. Then I text him to un-cancel and hitch a ride to Ellicott City with a friend. I arrive and say I am unlikely to sing. Then I choose Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk” and sing anyway.
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Later, I imagine all the beautiful songs that might have been closer to my range. The old insecurities leap on my shoulder like a gremlin. Can’t carry a tune, so give up on Broadway. Not handsome enough for anyone’s pilot. How lonely do you want to be?
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To be curious is to be beautiful is where I land, having read a friend’s second book of poems. I let go of a certain set of evidence.
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A line returns to me from a crown of sonnets I wrote during the pandemic, “If not Beauty, then common sense.” This is my dearest wish. I know it sounds like a defeat, but it isn’t. It’s a love song.
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Keats goes on to say in his letter to Bailey, “The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream — he awoke and found it truth.”
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In an “Ode to the Letter S,” I write, “stay awake says the sunset.”
Steven Leyva’s poetry collection is The Understudy’s Handbook.
