New American Tragedies

During one afternoon a couple of years ago at City College, while taking a study break in the English majors' lounge, I decided to look through the department's collection of literary journals, some of which dated back some thirty years. I could not help but wonder, as the name of writer after unknown writer passed over my eyes, whether, in time, another young man would come across my own work in some journal, and whether he would take a brief second to consider my life, my desires and impulses, my place in a world that measures its citizens by the weight of language. A grief then came over me, not because I feared that I would one day join the ranks of minor, forgotten writers (there are far worse identities to be had, to be sure), but because it occurred to me that so much of the writing life, this true circus, is about glorified failure, ready-made.

*

All of this is to say that I haven't written a single line of creative work since December 2007, which leads me to a certain preoccupation: Will the urge to write, once seemingly natural and ingrained, return? Will it be a matter of time before pen is set against paper, or will I have to relinquish that title, dear writer, I've worked so hard to develop?

*

Outside, somewhere in Prospect Park, parents are cheering their well-trained children, dressed in clean, multi-colored uniforms, running on the basepaths--perhaps at the expense of their own lives.

*

I should clarify that second point: I wrote a line of poetry just yesterday. It is only a line, a brief and not altogether good one, which, for the sake of readers not aware of the concept of failure, I shall keep to myself.

*

And now, a chorus of seven Vespas, so foreign, in a formation normally the domain of fighter pilots, on the road just beyond her third-floor window.

[D - R]