POEMS AT THE EDGE OF LIFE

All creative acts are aspirations…a quest to strive beyond oneself. The process becomes all the more poignant when the artist is in throes of final moments of his/her life. It is a daunting task, made not so simple by perceived associations with death and dying. Looking at the painting that Van Gogh made right at the end of his life Wheatfield With Crows we have a sense of the turmoil within.

Or the lines from Sylvia Plath’s Lazarus:

DYING

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well. 

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

I never heard of Clive James till I came across his hauntingly beautiful poem Japanese Maple in a recent issue of New Yorker (which I am appending at the end of this post). He was diagnosed with Leukaemia in 2011 and emphysema and kidney failure in 2012. Writing about his diagnosis and what it entails, he muses:

All day tomorrow I have tests and scans,
And everything that happens will be real.
My blood might say I should make no more plans,
And when it does so, that will be the deal.
But until then I love to speak with you
Each day we meet. Sometimes we even touch
Across the sad gulf that I brought us to.
Just for a time, so little means so much:
More than I’m worth, I know, as I know how
My death is something I must live with now.

Yet, although James so consciously and explicitly speaks of his own increasingly imminent death, I do not find his words maudlin or despondent. Sad, yes, but also hopeful. He does not bemoan his fate.

Even in suffering there is so much beauty to be found…

… But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air

As if there were not much more of it there

And write these poems, which are funeral songs

That have been taught to me by vanished time:

Not only to enumerate my wrongs

But to pay homage to the late sublime

That comes with seeing how the years have brought

A fitting end, if not the one I sought.’

His recent poem

JAPANESE MAPLE

Is achingly beautiful as the poet contrasts his imminent death with the longevity of the maple tree outside his window.,

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

Breath growing short

Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls

On that small tree

And saturates your brick back garden walls,

So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

This glistening illuminates the air.

It never ends.

Whenever the rain comes it will be there,

Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.

Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

What I must do

Is live to see that. That will end the game

For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,

A final flood of colours will live on

As my mind dies,

Burned by my vision of a world that shone

So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

Our life is so short… the love and experiences of life that it brings with it, is the only thing that truly matters…it is the only thing we can take with us.