That Undiscovered Country

93 - At the Funeral - Diapers & Dust - Crystal Ball - Lear - My Brother - Stella - 75

💀

93

The old man sits by himself in front of the window, while yellow liquid drips onto his shoe.

The boys’ giggles bubble up like cartoon circles, crowding into the rafters of the café.

The giggles bubble up against the windows that look out into the vast long world of continents and endless sky,

until the cumulated hilarity of dribbles turn into a surge his old muscles can no longer contain,

and they explode in laughter as the yellow water streams down the leg of his chair,

and they laugh and they laugh,

and over the years they laugh and they laugh until the tears drip down their faces.

💀

At the Funeral

At the funeral they were dry-eyed from crying for the last eighteen months. The hand of the doctor, which held every chemical and pill known to man, was held back by the lawyers and by the priests in black gowns, doing more rounds.*

The doctor, who had sworn to do no harm, had been forced to watch while the pandora box of pills brought on dementia and paroxysm.

The hand of the doctor was so shaken with the trembling of the seven million wards of shaking geriatrics, who could neither live nor die, that he couldn’t administer the blue pill of release, even if they let him.

——

* William Blake, stanza 3 from “The Garden of Love” (1794): “And I saw it was filled with graves, / And tomb-stones where flowers should be: / And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars, my joys & desires.”

💀

From Diapers to Diapers, From Dust to Dust

At 3 you’re happy to get all the toys: rattle, baubles, teeth.

At 70 you watch as each of these is slowly taken from you: hearing, seamen, knees.

At 93 you barely see them drifting outward over the dark blue water,

Charon smiting you with his oar, as they drift across the river of oblivion: teeth, baubles, rattle.

💀

Crystal Ball

We’ll all end up broken in the scrap-heap of time, with the boards and steel latches

that once-upon-a-time opened stained-glass windows to the rolling seas,

and with the callipers and giant mirrors that first showed us our small reflection in the rolling stars;

windows and mirrors shattered six feet under in a layer of sediment ten thousand years old.

💀

Lear

The grown man becomes a baby, the King a pauper, the athlete a paraplegic. We live in the glory, or at the mercy, of chemistry and physics.

Sooner or later, King Lear will rage in the waste land, and beg for scraps. He’ll tell trembling Edgar that unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

And yet we can’t stop ourselves from dreaming that we understand, that we grasp what’s going on, and that in some way we control the storm, standing tall on our barren heaths.

❤️

On the Death of My Brother

(aka ‘Plasterman,’ 1963 - 2020)

The dead do not require our tears, and yet we cry for ourselves, left in this world without them.

Of course we can go on, our passions like clocks that wind us from day to day. But when the day is over, we look to the west and see the rays are different now.

The sky is darker, layered in the endless night in which we too will be lost. Our hope of the morning sun has lost all metaphor, whatever else we dream might come.

The sky is also paler, for with each beam lost we stand diminished. Where once we thought ourselves masters of our fuller selves, a hole appears.

It seems too much like fiction to hope for a worm-hole, leading to heaven or new adventure. And so we fall back on memories, and flood the night with tears.

❤️

Stella d’Artois

The dead carry us with them
as we float like golden bubbles up the Champs-Élysées
like the angels we can’t see
they find a new home in our feelings
in the beating of our hearts
& in our footsteps
as we walk up the avenue thinking their thoughts
& remembering how they carried themselves:

the way my brother held the ping-pong bat
& the way my dad straightened his face when he was thinking
quizzically
about the way his doubtful son was thinking the way his father thought
and his father’s brother before him
as some long-lost relative opens the door
to a bar with a mosaic on the wall
of St. Peter & the Golden Keys