by Neil Astley
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
PHILIP LARKIN (1922-85)
from Le Petit Salvié
We didn’t know how ill you were…we knew how ill but hid it… we didn’t know how ill you were…
Those first days when your fever rose…if we’d only made you go into the hospital in Brive…
Perhaps you could have had another year…but the way you’d let death touch your life so little,
the way you’d learned to hold your own mortality before you like an unfamiliar, complex flower…
Your stoicism had become so much a part of your identity, your virtue, the system of your self-regard;
if we’d insisted now, you might have given in to us, when we didn’t, weren’t we cooperating
with what wasn’t just your wish but your true passion never to be dying, sooner dead than dying?
You did it, too: composed a way from life directly into death, the ignoble scribblings between elided.
It must be some body-thing, some species-thing, the way it comes to take me from so far,
this grief that tears me so at moments when I least suspect it’s there, wringing tears from me
I’m not prepared for, had no idea were even there in me, this most unmanly gush I almost welcome,
these cries so general yet with such power of their own I’m stunned to hear them come from me.
Walking through the street, I cry, talking later to a friend, I try not to but I cry again,
working at my desk I’m taken yet again, although, again, I don’t want to be, not now, not again,
though that doesn’t mean I’m ready yet to let you go…what it does mean I don’t think I know,
nor why I’m so ill prepared for this insistence, this diligence with which consciousness afflicts us.
I imagine you rising to something like heaven: my friend who died last year is there to welcome you.
He would know the place by now, he would guide you past the ledges and the thorns and terror.
Like a child I am, thinking of you rising in the rosy clouds and being up there with him,
being with your guru Baba, too, the three of you, all strong men, all partly wild children,
wandering through my comforting child’s heaven, doing what you’re supposed to do up there forever.
I tell myself it’s silly, all of this, absurd, what we sacrifice in attaining rational mind,
but there you are again, glowing, grinning down at me from somewhere in the heart of being,
ablaze with wonder and a child’s relief that this after all is how astonishingly it finishes.
In my adult mind, I’m reeling, lost – I can’t grasp anymore what I even think of death.
I don’t know even what we hope for: ecstasy? bliss? or just release from being, not to suffer anymore.
At the grave, the boring rabbi said that you were going to eternal rest: rest? why rest?
Better say we’ll be absorbed into the ‘Thou’, better be consumed in light, in Pascal’s ‘Fire’!
Or be taken to the Godhead, to be given meaning now, at last, the meaning we knew eluded us.
God, though, Godhead, Thou, even fire: all that is gone now, gone the dark night arguments,
gone the partial answers, the very formulations fail; I grapple for the questions as they fail.
Are we to be redeemed? When? How? After so much disbelief, will something be beyond us to receive us?
Redemption is in life, ‘beyond’ unnecessary: it is radically demeaning to any possible divinity
to demand that life be solved by yet another life: we’re compressed into this single span of opportunity
for which our gratitude should categorically be presumed; this is what eternity for us consists of,
praise projected from the soul, as love first floods outward to the other then back into the self…
Yes, yes, I try to bring you to this, too; yes, what is over now is over; yes, we offer thanks,
for what you had, for what we all have: this portion of eternity is no different from eternity,
they both contract, expand, cast up illusion and delusion and all the comfort that we have is love,
praise, the grace not to ask for other than we have…yes and yes, but this without conviction, too.
[…]
How ambiguous the triumphs of our time, the releasing of the intellect from myth and magic.
We’ve gained much, we think, from having torn away corrupted modes of aggrandizement and giantism,
those infected and infecting errors that so long held sway and so bloated our complacencies
that we would willingly inflict even on our own flesh the crippling implications of our metaphysic.
How much we’ve had to pay, though, and how dearly had to suffer for our liberating dialectics.
The only field still left to us to situate our anguish and uncertainty is in the single heart,
and how it swells, the heart, to bear the cries with which we troubled the startled heavens.
Now we have the air, transparent, and the lucid psyche, and gazing inward, always inward, to the wound.
The best evidence I have of you isn’t my memory of you, or your work, although I treasure both,
and not my love for you which has too much of me in it as subject, but the love others bore you,
bear you, especially Vikki, who lived out those last hard years with you, the despairs and fears,
the ambivalences and withdrawals, until that final week of fever that soaked both your pillows.
Such a moving irony that your last days finally should have seared the doubt from both of you.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly whom I cry for – you, that last night as we left you there,
the way you touched her with such solicitude, or her, the desolation she keeps coming to:
‘I’ve been facing death, touched death, and now I have a ghost I love and who loves me.’
Genevieve, your precious Gen, doesn’t quite know when to cry, or how much she’s supposed to cry,
or how to understand those moments when it passes, when she’s distracted into play and laughter
by the other kids or by the adults who themselves don’t seem to grasp this terrible non-game.
At the cemetery, I’m asked to speak to her, comfort her: never more impossible to move beyond cliché.
We both know we’re helplessly embedded in ritual: you wanted her, I tell her, to be happy,
that’s all, all her life, which she knows, of course, but nods to, as she knows what I don’t say,
the simplest self-revealing truths, your most awful fear, the brutal fact of your mortality:
how horribly it hurt to go from her, how rending not being here to help bear this very pain.
[…]
C.K. WILLIAMS (b. 1936)
(for Paul Zweig, 1935-84)
The Minister
We’re going to need the minister
to help this heavy body into the ground.
But he won’t dig the hole;
others who are stronger and weaker will have to do that.
And he won’t wipe his nose and his eyes;
others who are weaker and stronger will have to do that.
And he won’t bake cakes or take care of the kids –
women’s work. Anyway,
what would they do at a time like this
if they didn’t do that?
No, we’ll get the minister to come
and take care of the words.
He doesn’t have to make them up,
he doesn’t have to say them well,
he doesn’t have to like them
so long as they agree to obey him.
We have to have the minister
so the words will know where to go.
Imagine them circling and circling
the confusing cemetery.
Imagine them roving the earth
without anywhere to rest.
ANNE STEVENSON (b. 1933)
A Last Marriage
The children gone, grown into other arms,
Man of her heart and bed gone underground,
Powder and chunks of ash in a shamefast urn,
Her mother long since buried in a blue gown,
Friends vanishing downward from the highway crash,
Slow hospital dooms, or a bullet in the head,
She came at last alone into her overgrown
Shapeless and forlorn garden. Death was there
Too, but tangible. She hacked and dragged away
Horrors of deadwood, webbed and sagging foliage,
Self-strangling roots, vines, suckers, arboreal
Deformities in viperish coils. Sweat, anger, pity
Poured from her. And her flesh was jabbed by thorns,
Hair jerked by twigs, eyes stung by mould and tears.
But day by day in the afterbath she recovered stillness.
Day by day the disreputable garden regained
Its green tenderness. They wooed one another. The living
Responses issued from clean beds of earth.
It was a new marriage, reclusive, active, wordless.
Early each morning even in rain she walked
The reviving ground where one day she would knock and enter.
She took its green tribute into her arms and rooms.
Through autumn the pruned wood gave her ceremonial
Fires, where she saw lost faces radiant with love.
Beyond the window, birds passed and the leaves with them.
Now was a season to sit still with time to know,
Drawing each breath like a fine crystal of snow.
VIRGINIA HAMILTON ADAIR (b. 1913)
5
The Other Side
COMFORT & HAUNTING
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone.
SHELLEY
I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.
THEODORE ROETHKE
The dead are often just as living to us as the living are,
only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us,
but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
SAMUEL BUTLER
This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds.
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
BUDDHA
WHEN WE FEEL the presence of someone who has died, whether through dreams or imagination, second sight or sixth sense, such hauntings can offer comfort. In several of the poems here, the writers come to terms with loss by acting out a remembered or imaginary encounter; or they learn to think of the person they mourn not as dead but as how they were when most alive.
Notes from the Other Side
I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.
Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,
there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course
no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing
of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.
The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,
and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.
JANE KENYON (1947-95)
The Reassurance
About ten days or so
After we saw you dead
You came back in a dream.
I’m all right now you said.
And it was you, although
You were fleshed out again:
You hugged us all round then,
And gave your welcoming beam.
How like you to be kind,
Seeking to reassure.
And, yes, how like my mind
To make itself secure.
THOM GUNN (b. 1929)
Breath
People keep telling me you’re still here
I can talk to you. Sometimes I believe them.
If breath could mist the mirror you’d appear.
Till I remember the oxygen hissing
from your abandoned mask, making me lightheaded
as I sat, stroked your hand, witnessing
the still blow of morphia winning that last bout,
the long pause, the final angry sigh
as if the world had breathed me out.
PATRICIA POGSON (b. 1944)
Oh
Oh my, Harold Brodkey, of all people, after all this time, appearing to me,
so long after his death, so even longer since our friendship, our last friendship,
the third or fourth, the one anyway when the ties b
etween us definitively frayed,
(Oh, Harold’s a handful, another of his ex-friends sympathized, to my relief );
Harold Brodkey, at a Christmas eve dinner, of all times and places,
because of my nephew’s broken nose, of all reasons, which he suffered in an assault,
the bone shattered, reassembled, but healing a bit out of plumb,
and when I saw him something Harold wrote came to mind, about Marlon Brando,
how until Brando’s nose was broken he’d been pretty, but after he was beautiful,
and that’s the case here, a sensitive boy now a complicatedly handsome young man
with a sinewy edge he hadn’t had, which I surely remark because of Harold,
and if I spoke to the dead, which I don’t, or not often, I might thank him:
It’s pleasant to think of you, Harold, of our good letters and talks;
I’m sorry we didn’t make it up that last time, I wanted to but I was worn out
by your snits and rages, your mania to be unlike and greater than anyone else,
your preemptive attacks for inadequate acknowledgement of your genius…
But no, leave it alone, Harold’s gone, truly gone, and isn’t it unforgivable, vile,
to stop loving someone, or to stop being loved; we don’t mean to lose friends,
but someone drifts off, and we let them, or they renounce us, or we them, or we’re hurt,
like flowers, for god’s sake, when really we’re prideful brutes, as blunt as icebergs.