“Being almost ready now to say
Goodbye, / my thought limps after you.” In spite of my occasional impatience,
and my pretty standard reluctance, it has been good to follow Mr. Poet B. into all
these ruminations on death. We all do it. We should do it. A friend from grad
school at IU once told me she had woken up from a dream in the middle of the
night and realized, “One of these days, Lisa D___, you are going to die!” Yikes, but, yeah, of course. In
the meantime, peoples, smell the flowers and have a glass of wine.
There is also a thought in this poem
that Schwartz never had a child, “to turn him like a story, page on page, /
until it wearieth / and then the child must outgo on its own”. B. says, “My
parting farewell on your sons / who will not replace you yet.” Well, look, it
strikes me like another death cliché: Sure, your life was an ignominious
failure, but it was worth it if your offspring take the tailings of that
failure and transform them into success of their own, thereby transmogrifying parental
life-failure into a success anyway. In spite of all your screw ups. You don’t
even have to do anything! You can co-opt their efforts, because, you know, your
kids are yours…. Seems like a lot of
pressure to put on a kid, and anyway, their lives are theirs. But Schwartz didn’t
have any children, so Berryman’s grief-stricken sloth doesn’t amount to much
harm in the grand scheme of things.
Anyway, grieve. It’s okay for a
time. We send flowers to funerals, I’ve always thought, as a reminder that like
blossoms, life is short and beautiful. Then the petals drop off, we go to seed,
there’s a mess on the tablecloth, and it’s over. I assume that’s the point.
Following my poem yesterday, “Recovery,”
which I still like, I’ll resolve to see funeral bouquets in a different light,
as reminders to focus on the fragrance of the now, and forget those other “forethoughts
of grief”, as Wendell Berry phrases it. You sidestep the hourglass, the ticking
clock, that way. The now doesn’t tick.
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