Wishing for Pegasus

While my students were writing a timed essay yesterday, I was shuffling stuff around my desk and my hand fell on a collection of Billy Collins.  I opened it with a smile, thinking about last summer's AP reading, and I looked at a poem or two.  The next thing I knew, I had read almost the whole collection, and I had that strange ache under my breastbone his poetry always gives me.  I moved to a collection by Tretheway that was there, too, and it only increased my wonder and dissatisfaction.  She wrote of my own soil, my own home, and I cannot even bring my pen to paper anymore. 

Everything that is inside me that used to be able to produce poems has withered and died.  I want to write, but there is never a moment that can be ripped way for it.  Every production that I manage to eke out on corners of notebooks or legal pads is trite, juvenile, horrible.  I hate it all, throw it all away, cannot bear to see it.  I don't want to write about love.  That would be a lie.  I don't want to write about what I do.  That would break my heart.  I feel like I'm wandering around with my pen in my hand aimlessly, doodling on the white surface of the world.

I am able to produce something creative with my camera, capture tiny frozen moments through the lens, but it's not nearly the same.  Those are just shards and shadows, not full songs, and while I love the Nikon and I love to go take pictures, I don't feel numb, don't feel that rush of light and, for lack of a more graceful term, hellyeah that I feel when I know I've managed to get what is in my soul out onto paper in the right words at last. I feel like I've lost a sense, like I was once able to see or hear, and now through some calamity, I'm going to have to go through the world without it. 

Maybe this is just another thing stress is taking from me.  Maybe I have done all I was ever going to be able to do with my amateurish attempt, and I should accept this as an end and lay my pen down with grace and walk away.  Something inside me just can't though, and it howls and rages, rattles the bars of its cage and cries in the nights of the full moon, mutters when sun comes up in despair.  I wonder if this wound will ever heal.