“O world so ill arranged!” I
couldn’t be more sympathetic, although the world has its bright spots as well.
It looks in the first stanza as if Henry fell down—falling and falling through
levels of air—and broke a bone somehow. So his statement isn’t quite the broad
philosophical lament it might seem out of its context: “Couldn’t William at
least break a collar-bone?” This puts things on a more prosaic level, and it’s
funny enough. Then comes a reference to the pills. Lots and lots of pills come
with the hospital visit, to add to the parade of pharmaceuticals he’s probably
taking already. The doctors, as one can imagine, haven’t been sure how to treat
the self-destructive alcoholic, but you can bet drugs were involved. So how
handle this lost cause?
There seems to firm no answer
save from the sexton in the place
that blinds
& stones and does not hurt:
Henry springs youthfully
in his six-by-two like a dancer.
A sexton is the caretaker for a
churchyard, also usually the gravedigger, so that place that blinds &
stones is the grave—there’s the answer. His six-by-two is his coffin. Of course
he spent some figurative couple weeks down there some time back in the op.
post. series, which is still humorous enough, especially that last scene where,
once liberated, he’s back in the midnight churchyard with a shovel, digging his
way back down to the comfort of the coffin! His six-by-two here is a bit less
comically literal than that; it’s his figurative coffin, the confines of which
are imposed by his body (his failing body). But from that he still “dances”.
Dance is the body-movement art, so there’s something odd about him dancing from
a failing and now broken body, but for the poet, it’s actually a reference to
his writing, which seems to be dancing away splendidly.
I pulled a nerve in my neck once,
the discomfort of which I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and I couldn’t sit at the
computer (pre-laptop days) for nine months. No writing on my dissertation got
done that year, because my body had other plans. But if you’re lucky, you only break
your left arm when you get injured , so you can still sit in a bar, with
notebook and pencil, and dance and dance like Fred Astaire. His Ginger Rogers
is the whole screwed up planet and that miniscule corner of it in the form of
his screwed up psyche. It’s glamourous too, like foxtrotting with a shaved
orangutan in a sparkly dress.
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