If Rays of Light Genuflected, That Light


What if we listen in to his last interview.
What if we picture F. Scott Fitzgerald tying a gold
ribbon over a lavender one, making a choker
and stepping back from his creation with a smile
that is one of those gestures of fierce pleasure
and defiance delivered with the force of a kind word.
The very least you need to say that speaks volumes.

It’s 1940, December, and he contains all 20th Century
American Literature in that circus moment of splaying
his arms outward before an eye-level sequel of himself,
anything but humble in a three-piece suit and Christmas-
ribbon choker. Fitzgerald seems to know that his smile
cancels and affirms like passages of marginalia humming
a cappella tunes to Eternity in the galley proofs of Gatsby.
Orders in looping cursive. Distinctive arrows and Xs.

The room roils in the usual deep trough of vicissitudes
and mirror-reversed sentry birds on power lines outside.
All afternoon long, newsprint-colored winter sunlight
has been breaking through, trying to, one dirty sky
of skidding cloud cover umbilicaled for a time
to the best and worst in the sad, famous man.
The dilute half-glow of the Midwest, the light of poetry.
A light possessed of stories of self-crucifixion.
If rays of light genuflected, that light.

But he’s having none of it. He’s about what’s to come.
Says, This is Daisy, don’t you think? and the interviewer
is writing like mad, his hand flying across a steno pad.
At last, the look on Fitzgerald’s face says I feel cheated.
A look registering as if after a whack upside the head
or while stalling for time to answer the interviewer’s
insinuation that he may, in fact, have wasted his life.


A finalist for the Miller Williams prize, Roy Bentley has published ten books of poetry. His work has appeared in Able Muse, Blackbird, Shenandoah, december, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner among others. His latest books of poems, Beautiful Plenty, is out from Main Street Rag (2021).