Jordan Baker

It is not Gatsby’s book, it is a Nick Carraway’s book.
Often so - they often say.
Yet the only truly still center is Jordan Baker, whose eyes see plainly the doomed space between Jay and Daisy.
Whose eyes peer in steel about the trashlands of Long Island, near enough to the thing we have traditionally called omniscience.
And it is she who makes and quits the scene,
she who pities Nick his rube’s erudition.
Jordan is Fitzgerald’s only confidante, whose story it is, and she is more than he aloof, detached, cool.
Wiser than Scott?
Willing to dance mid flames.
Jordan is in the wings, as we (readers) frittel and pombel our chere bloopers in gluttonous manes of musical chairs:
on our stage and on our stages,
in our despoiled and pathetic present tense.