Dear Unseen Correspondent: Yours of the 16th has been received and recorded in the Book of Life, or in your case the Book of Death, though it’s not easy to decide in which category your comments fall. Why not both? For you reside in that twilight land somewhere between conception and death while your innocent souls are purged and prepared for who knows what.
This much we do know: It is the Angel of Death who gives our firefly lives definition, who rounds it with a little sleep, perchance to dream. From nothing to another nothing we proceed apace, but in the interval there is every emotion the poets record. One of those poets, Basil Bunting, found his eyes misting as he lovingly fingered all the emotional goods that he was leaving behind on departing this vale of tears. It made quite an inventory:
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul they are so rotten, old and thin, or firm and soft and warm
and warm and fullfeltmonger Death gets every skin. All that’s piteous, all that’s fair All that is fat and scant of breath, Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, is Death’s collateral.
And the poet left behind this undying assurance of love for you in limbo, who still wait, wait, wait, wait for the release that either life or death would bring. It is a message beyond tears:
Tears are for what can be mended, not for a voyage ended the day the schooner put out. Short fear and sudden quiet too deep for a diving thief. Tears are for easy grief. [. . .] Words slung to the gale stammer and fail: ‘Unseen is not unknown, unkissed is not unloved; unheard is not unsung;’ Words late, lost, dumb.
An old man can now only sit here and finger everything in this treasure chest of hopes and regrets as he sends you this greeting, hoping you will receive it in the spirit in which it is intended—a spirit of atonement for what can never be atoned for. Consider this a confession, but not one presented tearfully but hopefully.
Every day I pass a photograph of my mother’s sister Temya on my rounds in this monk’s cell my house has become on those occasions. Temya was the sister who reared my mother in the middle of the battlefield their shtetl had become during the First War, then known as the Great War in the years before it would be surpassed by a still greater one. And the realization hits anew that dying is no trick compared to enduring the pain of life. Out of that pain the poet makes his music:
A strong song tows
us, long earsick,
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.
Night, float us.
Offshore wind, shout,
ask the sea
what’s lost, what’s left,
what horn sunk,
what crown adrift.
Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?
What a vanity of vanities: Each us is tempted to remain the centerpiece of our own brief existence. But it is not we who last but the poetry, that eternal song of rhyme and reason mixing.
—––––– ❖ –––––—
Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.