Superpower - Nov 2 2020

 

Superpower

Nov 2 2020

I am slowly disappearing.

I can only suppose

this is how a beautiful woman feels

who's grown accustomed to the male gaze,

more and more invisible

with the encroachment of age.

Not that I've ever been noticed,

but now, I'm not even seen for myself

by for what I appear.

But harder to understand

is actually getting smaller,

my settling spine, thinning muscles

fast receding hair.

Even less of me to be seen

and overlooked.

So while the younger me

may have been full of himself,

the passage of time

has taught me humility.

I always wished I could fly,

but my superpower now

is invisibility,

the incredible shrinking man

inconspicuous

and unselfconscious.

But still watchfully observing the world,

free of seduction, ambition, approval

and the other distractions of youth.

Of course, nothing lasts.

And the iron law of entropy

dictates a cold motionless end

to everything.

A universe, disappearing like me

making room for what follows;

another Big Bang, perhaps

or my descendants and heirs.

Who will also shrink

as the pendulum swings

and generations succeed

from next to next to next.

While I bemoan my diminished physical state (especially since having just had a hip replacement, I'm feeling atypically frail) I appreciate the antidote to self-importance that comes with age. In this poem, this idea of getting physically smaller and socially invisible dovetails with the view of life not as something linear, like an ever ascending line of a graph, but as something cyclical: growing and then shrinking; generations succeeding; perhaps even a pendulum universe that keeps on recapitulating creation.

Getting smaller can be both good and bad. One can take refuge invisibility. But becoming irrelevant is also hard on the ego. A beautiful woman, who has always found the male gaze trying, may feel relieved not to be repeatedly hit on, and in not being judged solely by her looks. But I suspect there is always some regret: everyone wants to be seen as desirable, so being ignored and going unseen is a burden as well. Secretly, she may very well envy her younger self.

You may be familiar with the “superpower” party trick, in which people are asked which they'd prefer: the power of flight, or invisibility? The answer is immediately obvious to me: flight. I already have the power of invisibility, after all: I've felt invisible all my life!

Alas, unlike the narrator, I am single and childless, and will have no descendants and heirs. Please, never mistake a poem for autobiography.