The Last Romantics(56)
This was not the first time I’d considered or responded to this kind of critique, although it was generally delivered with more acuity. Given what was happening in the world of late, I had devoted more than passing thought to becoming involved in politics. My work at ClimateSenseNow! ended decades ago. In recent years, I’d attended rallies, donated money, private actions of a private citizen, but publicly I hadn’t done much at all. No op-eds, no speeches, no social media, no fund-raising efforts or lending my words to a campaign, although I’d been asked to take part in all these various ways.
The dilemma was that any words I might say at a lectern or in the pages of a newspaper would never achieve the same strength as the words I wrote as a poet. Inspiration, calls to action, can take many forms. It is not so much the persuasive force of an argument that prompts engagement, but a feeling that inspires it. A sense of injustice, a longing for redemption, empathy, rage. What better to provoke any of these than a poem?
I thought of how best to explain this to the young man, but he had started to yell—at full volume, with profanity and frustration. What was I to do? The flame-haired woman in the front row shifted in her chair. Luna watched the man impassively, as though she were accustomed to this sort of display. I considered the balance of public engagement and private protection. I considered the power of poetry, of art. I considered my sources of inspiration and what might have moved Luna’s mother to select her daughter’s name from the last line of a poem written by me seventy-five years earlier. It took a madman to believe that individual involvement might change a system. It required a miracle, it required magic. Or maybe not. Maybe all it required was the alchemy of individuals who believe first that they can change themselves.
“—fuckin’ imbeciles, assholes, how dare you try to do that, and then you can’t even—” The man was still yelling. I had lost track of what he specifically wanted from me. Henry and I watched him as he raised his hands and shook a fist.
“He’s an angry one,” Henry said, leaning into me. “Times like these I’m happy the Second Amendment didn’t make it.”
At last the young man quieted down. His face was red, sweat running from his temples. I glanced around, saw no security guards. They must have long since wandered off, perhaps to address the lights or to venture outside; or perhaps they’d been called by a higher authority to assist with a more pressing emergency.
“My dear man,” I said. “Come up here. Please. Come onstage.”
Henry turned to me. “Fiona, no,” he whispered. “This isn’t wise.”
But I ignored Henry. I waved the man forward. After a brief, confused hesitation, he climbed the steps to the stage two at a time. There was a folding chair propped against a wall, and he pulled it, legs squeaking, to sit beside me.
“Come closer,” I said, and he did. I heard the rapid rhythm of his breath.
“Give me your hand,” I instructed.
It was very quiet in the auditorium. I saw Luna watching the scene with her head tilted as though watching a minor but deadly event unfold in nature, a bird pulling a worm from the ground or a cat toying with a mouse. Something of morbid interest that had nothing at all to do with her.
“Did you know I trained as a palm reader?” I said to the man. “After the accident I searched for many years for reason and truth in a variety of different disciplines. I wanted to understand why people put their faith in things like palm readers, clairvoyants, mediums. Was it simply desperation, or was there something we didn’t quite understand? Magic or God or whatever you want to call it, something that explains those events that science cannot.”
“Well?” the man said.
“Well. I never found an answer. Only that people are gullible. And playing on that gullibility has given rise to a great number of professions. But”—I held up a finger—“I don’t believe there is anything wrong with offering a gullible person hope, so long as that person believes it to be genuine. In fact, I think hope, even if premised on a falsehood, can be a thing of great power.”
I took his hand gently in mine and turned it palm up. My fingers were wrinkled sausages, the nails unpainted, my own palm unreadable now, though I can tell you what my reading once said: A long and eventful life. Love and pain and love again.
This man’s skin was rough, pocked with calluses, flaky and dry. I smoothed it with my fingers, rubbed my palm against his to warm it. I felt those calluses, like a clutch of small pebbles fetched from the bottom of a pond.
I put my glasses on my nose. “Let me see here,” I said, and peered first into the man’s eyes—which had gone from wild to calm and beseeching—and then at his palm. Yes, there it was: the lifeline. It curved and cracked and started up again and cracked a second time.
“Your life has been hard,” I said.
The man grunted, shrugged his shoulders.
“But the future holds much promise. Your love line is strong. See here?” I traced it with my index finger. Beneath, I felt the pulse of the man’s blood.
What I wanted to say to this man was that the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.