Poems to Cure the Waters

poem for Tê´t

Lang Co village, Vietnam
Lunar New Year, 31/1/1995
Ted Sexauer


This is the poem
that will save my life
this is the line that will cure me
this word, this, the word word the one

this breath the one I am

Rather than going on and on about Ted Sexauer, a Buddhist and a veteran of war, I'd like to leave space for his poems to speak his truths. On this day, as I enjoy the freedom and privilege of flying across an ocean, unchallenged and (inshallah) unharmed, it seems a wiser course to allow a poet to do what poets do: use words to explore, to question and reveal, to pray (on behalf of us all) for preservation.

The Well by the Trail to My An
Binh Dinh Province, 1970

I think of you
papa-san, grandfather,

Ông,
standing at your open well
there you are, smiling host
to a squad of well-armed foreigners, pulling up
red Folger’s coffee cans of cool sweet water
dousing bowed teenaged heads
eight young men this time, huge, all hairy
like dogs, bearing strange black rifles
(they will not go away) wearing only
boots and floppy war-green undershorts
careless youth from a rich world, blind
to soap water spilling back down the well
your task of diplomacy to keep the soap out
without getting shot

for once
I could see clearly what you thought
as I watched you grin and nod non-stop
like an imbecile, disappearing in that grin
into a sea of caricature papa-sans
I saw something I knew in your eyes
I saw you calling on the god
of get me out of this
I saw in you myself
desperate to preserve the healthful water

Nap Time

That, I'm thinking, is what life isn't (although I believe that life is also lived in dream time, especially if one has lucid dreams).

Life, though, is for the living -- and I (for once not being glib, although unduly parenthetical, which is a sign, but I do not know for what) do not mean that it is not for the dead, but that is is a thing to be fully lived, not kissed on the cheek and lightly dodged in case it reciprocate with something more overwhelming, but rather that it be taken openly and fully, embraced and yielded to, in full-throated and (inshallah) full-bodied welcome, utterly.

Today, I find myself in the tired simplistic mode, thinking of this life as a road and this time as our chance to journey along it. The only guaranteed companion on this road is oneself. However far you run, however fast you travel, there you are. It serves each of us well, then, to know and be comfortable with her or himself, otherwise it's going to be an awfully awkward (and simply awful) trip, serving no-one well.

Me being me and the body and its fillings being what they are, this word-path runs to Rumi, a Sufi mystic and a poet. (John Moyne and Coleman Barks, translators) (Is that not a wonderful thing: 'to translate'? Think on it.)

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn't decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

You don't need to be a Sufi to understand or heed that call. Whatever your faithlessness or faith, it's only ('only' -- ha) a matter of being awake, fully alive inside and out, hearing, sensing, knowing, not racing through without being where you are. Thousands of years of study and meditation and refining faiths seem offhandedly dismissed in that.

In the 1st century, someone approached Rabbi Hillel and said, 'If you can tell me all of Judaism while standing on one leg, I'll convert.' The rabbi lifted one foot from the ground and said, 'Be good to each other. The rest is commentary.'

Rumi isn't telling anybody when or what or how to pray, what to ingest and avoid, how to do or be. He is exhorting wakefulness.

Someone cleverer than I (I do not -- yet -- know who this person is or was) said tartly that it's okay to fall asleep in the middle of the road; somebody will be along in a while to wake you up. This is true. However, I know that it is possible for me to sleep through an alarm, how easy it is to hit the snooze button, and how unbearably seductive is the temptation to go back to bed (those duvets are warm and the mattress comfortable, still formed to fit the body).

If you're awake, then try to stay that way. Begs cup after cup of spiritual caffeine. Why Christ made wine instead of espresso (Wake up, people.), I do not know . . . although I do like a good glass of wine and it, too, serves its many purposes.

I'm not going to go on at length. Rumi wrote, 'Be silent! be silent! for love behaves contrary to normal; Here the meaning hides itself if you talk too much.' I think I'm going to be still for a while and listen.

Drowning, Not Writing

I have just returned from Dorset to London and have, still, the sound of mermaids echoing in my chambered ears. (Yes, I was inland. No, it doesn't matter.) Human voices are wakeful, as are cars and trains and bustle and haste. I shall put aside my keyboard and try, for a while, to reclaim the fading songs. I leave you in the more graceful company of Thomas Stearns Eliot and promise to revisit him and his in greater detail before those of us still living have gathered many more days.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”(
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all:
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress 65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

If There Must be Princesses

Fat is not a Fairy Tale
Jane Yolen

I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Cinder Elephant,
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
Where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted;
flinging herself down the stairs.

I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundzel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.

I am thinking of fairy tale
that is not yet written,
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun wheels, cookies, and the princess.

If there must be princesses, then let them be real -- not in that long past-tense illusory sense of 'them' ('royals') having different blood from 'us' (a sense that would vanish vast enough if one of the purported 'them' needed a transfusion), but real. Paper-bound princesses should have pimples and fears and be 'too fat' or 'too thin' (whatever those terms mean, wherever they mean them and however mean they are meant to be).

The glorious The Paper Bag Princess, product of the equally remarkable Robert Munsch, started life as breath. It was a told tale before it was a printed one. In The Paper Bag Princess, the princess is the hero of her own story. (Whether or not we like it, we are all the protagonists of our life's stories. Whether we are the heroes, the antiheroes, interferences or something else is a matter of personal choice.) At some point, I hope to insert an audio file of Munsch telling his Princess. For now, all I can do is suggest you read it -- or get somebody to read it to you.

This is not a gender-specific rant. Heroes and heroines come in all forms, shapes, sizes, ages, and and and, with arrays of flaws and strengths. They are not lacking in fear. Bravery is not a tribute of the fearless. Dorothy Bernard said, 'Courage is fear that said its prayers.' Therefore, let us celebrate cowards who do it anyway, who do it despite, who do it because the good thing must be done, regardless of all the 'isms' with which we and others might tattoo us.

We cannot dream in flawless skins. For our sakes, for the reading dreamers, let the person in the story be as the person hearing or reading the tale, not the norm, not a porcelain ideal, not the unattainable doing the impossible, but someone we can hope to be achieving the things we would like to be able to do.

The Peculiarity of Trees

The trees are being peculiarly.
I cannot say, how.
It makes me uneasy.

Pentti Saarikoski, translated by Susanna Laaksonen.

It is comforting to know that trees 'behave' around others. Despite appearances, this blog is not dendrophilic (if a blog can be passionate about something; it's cousin to the questions about what powers are innate to guns). I sense communication in everything from rustling leaves to the pepper grilling in the kitchen ('Will you turn me all ready?' grumble sizzle grumble grizzle seethe). Saarikoski, who was born in Impilahti in 1937 and died in a monastery 46 years later, was a major figure in Finnish literature in the 1960s and 70s. Enough years for you? That Saarikoski didn't have many may have been due to his heavy drinking. Saarikoski's father was a journalist; his mother, the daughter of a baker. He spent a few years working as a satirical columnist for the conservative newspaper Uusi Suomi, writing under a pseudonym (Nenä). He married (Mia, whom he called his Molly Bloom), joined the Finnish Communist Party (That must have gone down well with his ex-employers.) and edited the Party newspaper, Aikalainen.

He put his politics in his poetry:

120 miles from Leningrad
(trans. by Anselm Hollo)

We sit here surrounded by our forests,
backs turned to the giant and stare at his image in a well’s eye.
He wears a dark suit, white shirt, silver-grey tie.
In this country everything is quite different,
there people walk on or without their heads.

So we have Saarikoski openly angry, married and Communist. Oh, yes, and famous, and living a little tiny weensy bit beyond the edge.

It's not fair to portray him as hard (as if you could, given the poem atop the page). Here's a reflective pondering of war:

What would happen to me
it there was a war and they closed the borders?
I couldn't go anywhere, disqualified as I am
from soldiering; I suppose
I'd have to sit up nights, composing
orders for the day.

Saarikoski was neither forced to satire nor married to political diatribe. He is described as a trickster, compared with James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Che Guevera, Rilke and Rimbaud, and held by some to be a philosopher. Certainly, he was prolific: fifteen collections of poetry, five prose works, three radio plays, and more than seventy translations (modern and ancient), including Alan Ginsberg, J D Salinger, Euripedes, Sappho, Philip Roth and Italo Calvino. (It was fun putting that list in order.) Do you hunger for a couple of specifics? Saarikoski translated The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses, getting Greek mythology two ways.

Shades of Kit Marlowe: What if Saarikoski hadn't died so young?

A biscuit for you trivia hounds: Saarikoski liked to use Webster's Third New International Dictionary. A consolation bikky for those of you dedicated to strict form: Saarikoski wasn't. (Tell yourselves that you are wiser than he.)

The heavy drinking -- this is not a unique passage, be warned -- led to repeated stays in hospitals, which led to reevaluation of life, which led to an interest in early Christianity. This brought Saarikoski to translate Matthew's gospel. He proceeded to set Christ and his apostles as revolutionaries. Don't go all 'duh' on me. We're talking Che Guevera. It's another sort of revolution. We're also in the late 1960's and in Finland. Consider your place- and time-line.

Here's a bleakly impressive list. Saarikoski went to London, came back and returned to hospital. He weighed a whopping 126 pounds (57 kilos). This is no surprise, given what was going on with him. Here's the list, as found online: alcoholismus chronicus, epilepsia symtomatica, chirrosis hepatis, and encopresis. Hep and epilepsy alone would be enough to send me back to bed for the long haul and have me drinking nothing harder than mint tea.

In the 1970s, Saarikoski retired. He and his wife moved to Kerava, north of Helsinki, where Saarikoski developed an interest in the work of Eino Leino, a Finnish poet who straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He had a gift for gentle and evocative descriptions: The moon is the heel of a limping shoe. (translated by Doug Robinson)

Saarikoski's travels took him not only to England, but also to Ireland, Greece, France and elsewhere. He moved to Sweden. Towards the end of his life, he started talking about returning to Finland, but it never happened. In 1983, Saarikoski died of cirrhosis of the liver. He is buried in the graveyard of monastery of Valamo in Heinävesi.

Here's a taste of the translator of myths --

Aft, he sleeps,
untwitching,
he has seen all places
and been made to suffer,
they call him godlike,
the ship rides the wine-dark waves,
he is on his way home,
he sleeps.

(translated, in turn, by Anselm Hollo)

-- and of the philosopher --

Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he’d like to be dead in,

grey skies pass over,
the sky’s a hanging garden
and earth comes into the mouth like bread.

I am at a loss for the translator for that poem. It's from Runot ja Hipponaksin runot, which was published in 1959, and please don't ask me to translate the title. I'm happy enough to have found it.

There's literal truth in the poem, if you are of that mind. The earth does come into the mouth like bread -- as bread and as other things. But . . . I've been buried alive and the earth coming over you sounds like a storm, like thunder at the end of the world. Unite Saarikoski's 'earth coming into the mouth like bread' with Catullus' 'starvelings under the earth' and you have food fit for thought.

Donne and Done

The Expiration
John Donne

So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away ;
Turn, thou ghost, that way, and let me turn this,
And let ourselves benight our happiest day.
We ask none leave to love ; nor will we owe
Any so cheap a death as saying, 'Go.'

Go; and if that word have not quite killed thee,
Ease me with death, by bidding me go too.
Or, if it have, let my word work on me,
And a just office on a murderer do.
Except it be too late, to kill me so,
Being double dead, going, and bidding, 'Go.'

When I first met John Donne, he was in his lush and tactile phase. For a long time, that was all I knew of him. (It was all I was ready to know. The comment is not about him, but me.)

The first (and second, and third) time I read that poem, it was from a slender, slipcased volume given to my mother by her university-life lover. Love gave to love gave a daughter a gleam of love -- and of the swift pain it can inflict.

That turnaround: Any so cheap a death as saying, 'go.'/Go . . . and that flagellant's anguish of an ending, bidding 'Go' and walking away (without, I thought, the strength to turn for a final glance) from the beloved.

When I had tucked a few more years under my belt, I ascribed to the poem meanings of death. It was an easy stretch from the parting of two -- perhaps twinned -- souls to the parting of soul from body: a terminal lover's parting, life from life. Later still, after I spent some time with the bawdy bard a sexual meaning to the mentioned 'death' (ease me with death). Overall and over time, I have remained faithful to my first interpretation: lover parting from lover, one last kiss held and held although not held long enough and then finally -- Go -- because a heart can take only so much slow dying.

Parting is death. All endings are deaths. Mourning, grief; we weep not for the dead, who are past sorrow, but for ourselves, who live now incomplete, without those gone. It's close to literally true. We take different roles in different circumstances and with different beings: mother, father, older sibling, younger, employer, new lover, long-term beloved, spouse, employee, servant, artist, injured dog, rearing horse, newborn infant, dying kinsman, friend, confessor, deity. It is hard when you are a child and your cat dies. It is harder to lose, of necessity, one the taste of whose lips is as familiar as your own, whose rhythms have joined, adapted to and altered yours, whose voice stills your sorrows, whose touch is everything.

Leave off . . .

I hear it quiet and pained. More than pained: anguished, but anguish without an outward cry. There is strength in bidding go, in calling enough and in walking away.

Who knows, though, whether that was the right choice? Perhaps two lives -- maybe many -- would have been better lived had the two embodied souls stayed here united.

The man could have talked a saint into worldly unity. This is from Elegy XX (To His Mistress Going to Bed): As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be/To taste whole joys.

That kind of talk would turn me into a girl who cain't say 'No' and I'm a thick and obdurate little biscuit.

John Donne, a Metaphysical Poet and compelling clergyman, was born in 1572, on Broad Street in London, to a Roman Catholic family. This was the era of the Protestant Reformation. During that time, Catholics were subject to persecution.

His father, also named John, was a warden of the ironmongers. His mother was, to my eye, more interesting: a great-niece of Thomas More, daughter of playwright Thomas Heywood and -- this will become pertinent later -- sister of Jasper Heywood, a translator and Jesuit.

John the elder joined the majority when his son was four years old. I think his influence can be dismissed.

In 1591, Donne's brother Henry was arrested for giving shelter to a Catholic priest. Henry died in prison. This death may mark the insertion of the wedge between John Donne and the Catholic Church. In the 1590s, Donne converted to Anglicanism.

His poetic gifts were plain, but did not bring him cash. He depended on the kindness -- not of strangers, but of friends. In 1615, Donne became an Anglican priest; later that year, he was appointed Royal Chaplain. In 1621, Donne was appointed Dean of St Paul's (Not in the 'current' building, which was designed by Christopher Wren in 1673.) (How is that current? It's still standing.).

Let me take a longer road along his life. At the age of 11, Donne entered Oxford University. After three years there, he went on to Cambridge, where he spent another three years. Neither institution can claim to have conferred a degree upon him. It wasn't a question of intelligence or competency. Donne refused to take the oath of supremacy recognising the monarch of England as the head of the Church of England. His parents (consider, here, the possible ramifications) had Donne educated by the Jesuits. He studied law in London: sound preparation for a diplomatic career.

Students are students have always been students (with a nod and a raised cup of chamomile tea to the acknowledged proofs of the rule). Donne spent his study years learning -- not only about books, but also about wine, women and travel.

Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal (no small office in those times). Donne, in his twenties, began a secret courtship with Egerton's teenage niece, Anne More. They married in 1601. A challenge to the validity of the marriage landed Donne in jail, together with the minster and witness to the wedding. When the marriage was shown to be valid, Donne was released; he saw to it that the others were set free, as well, showing that he remembered a thing or three from law school.

Back to the kindness of strangers. Donne, his wife and their increasing brood lived with Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wolly. Donne worked as a lawyer: a far less profitable generator of income in those days.

Donne died without a single published collection of verse (Staggering, isn't it?) in 1631. It's difficult to put his work in order, as it was all published, as it were, post mortem. Sin, death, sensuality, romance; in whatever stage of his life he contemplated each, each came under the same intelligent, passionate and tender observation.

In Meditation XVII in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Several Steps in my Sickness, Donne wrote

NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS.

Now this bell tolling softly for another,
says to me, Thou must die.

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill that he knows not it tolls for him. And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as they who are about me, and see my state, have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

(You know where this is going.) Donne's meditation continues until it finds a shore in this:

No man is an island. entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

(No, kids, Hemingway did not mint the phrase. No, it is not plagiarism when you nick a phrase for a title -- although you'd best be certain as to the pertinence of your reference.)

Donne's bringing me back 'round to my earlier realisation: every death (however large, however small) is, in some way, mine. (There's a good reason for volunteering in a soup kitchen or an animal shelter, or chucking that Saturday night movie cash at one of Kiva's borrowers.)

How could a death bell not jolt the most unwary into a sudden remembrance of his or her own mortality: Oh, yes, that's right. My time, too, is less than it was, shorter than I think. (Better get a move on, then. Tomorrow doesn't come with guarantees that it will come at all.)

Intellect can increase or decrease distance. It is to Donne's credit that he used his mind to delve rather than to deny.

There's a play, profoundly moving (I encourage you to bypass the film and to make a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Center Library and beg the librarians to let you watch a tape of the Broadway show.), wrenching Pulitzer Prize-winning play called Wit. It was written by a kindergarten teacher (which should be an unbound set of life lessons to us all), Margaret Edson. It opens when the lead character, Vivian (fifty, bald, hospital gowned and braceleted, attached to an IV drip) enters the empty stage. Skipping the stage directions, here's what follows:

Vivian: (In false familiarity, waving and nodding to the audience) Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. That's just great. (In her own professorial tone) This is not my standard greeting, I assure you.

I tend toward something a little more formal, a little less inquisitive, such as, say, 'Hello.'

But it is the standard greeting here.

There is some debate as to the correct response to this salutation. Should one reply 'I feel good,' using 'feel' as a copulative to link the subject, 'I', to its subjective complement, 'good'; or 'I feel well,' modifying with an adverb the subject's state of being?

I don't know. I am a professor of seventeenth-century poetry, specializing in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne.

So I just say, 'Fine.'

Of course it is not very often that I do feel fine.

I have been asked, 'How are you feeling today?' while I was throwing up into a plastic washbasin. I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice, 'How are you feeling today?'

I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me the question and I am dead.

I'm a little sorry that I'll miss that.

It is unfortunate that this remarkable line of inquiry has come to me so late in my career. I could have exploited its feigned solicitude to great advantage as I was distributing the final examination to the graduate course in seventeenth-century textual criticism -- 'Hi. How are you feeling today?'

Of course I would not be wearing this costume at the time, so the question's ironic significance would not be fully apparent.

As I trust it is now.

Irony is a literary device that will necessarily be deployed to great effect.

I ardently wish this were not so. I would prefer that a play about me be cast in the mythic-heroic-pastoral mode, ut the facts, most notably stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, conspire against that. The Faerie Queene this is not.

And I was disayed to discover that the play would contain elements of . . . humor.

I have been, at best, an unwitting accomplice. (She pauses.) It is not my intention to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end.

They've given me less than two hours.

If I were poetically inclined, I might employ a threadbare metaphor -- the sands of time slipping through the hourglass, the two-hour class.

Now our sands are almost run;
More a little, and then dumb.

Shakespeare. I trust the name is familiar.

Vivian's training allows her a brief distance from her death. Her knowledge, discipline and gathered information can be barricades or scimitars. It is not only intellect that calls this character to Donne, and Edson made no error in creating Vivian as a Donne scholar. In a later passage, earlier in Vivian's life, we see her as a student. Her tutor is E.M.

E.M. This is Metaphysical Poetry, not The Modern Novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?

The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life.

In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:

And Death -- capital D -- shall be no more -- semicolon!
Death -- capital D -- comma -- thou shalt die -- exclamation point!

If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare.

Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets reurns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610 -- not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads:

And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.
(As she recites this line, she makes a little gesture at the comma.)

Nothing but a breath -- a comma -- separates life from life everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points. It's a comma, a pause.

This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.

Nothing but a breath, not insuperable barriers, just a comma. Which leads with sweet humanity to Donne's Holy Sonnet X (a semicolon-bearing, exclamation-free version):

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which yet thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more, must low
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

This is the Meanwhile

I shall marry the miller's son,
Pin my hat on a nice piece of property.
Friday nights, for a bit of fun, we'll go dancing.
Meanwhile...

It's a wink and a wiggle and a giggle in the grass
And I'll trip the light fandango,
A pinch and a diddle in the middle of what passes by.
It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch
To the paunch and the pouch and the pension.
It's a very short road to the ten thousandth lunch
And the belch and the grouch and the sigh.

In the meanwhile,
There are mouths to be kissed before mouths to be fed
And a lot in between in the meanwhile.
And a girl ought to celebrate what passes by.

Or I shall marry the businessman
Five fat babies and lots of security.
Friday nights, if we think we can,
We'll go dancing.
Meanwhile...

It's a push and a fumble and a tumble in the sheets
And I'll foot the highland fancy,
A dip in the butter and a flutter with what meets my eye.
It's a very short fetch from the push and the whoop
To the squint and the stoop and the mumble.
It's not much of a stretch to the cribs and the croup
And the bosoms that droop And go dry.

In the meanwhile,
There are mouths to be kissed before mouths to be fed,
And there's many a tryst and there's many a bed
To be sampled and seen in the meanwhile.
And a girl has to celebrate what passes by.

Or I shall marry the Prince of Wales,
Pearls and servants and dressing for festivals.
Friday nights, with him all in tails,
We'll have dancing.
Meanwhile...

It's a rip in the bustle and a rustle in the hay
And I'll pitch the quick fantastic,
With flings of confetti and my petticoats away up high.
It's a very short way from the fling that's for fun
To the thigh pressing under the table.
It's a very short day til you're stuck with just one
Or it has to be done on the sly.

In the meanwhile,
There are mouths to be kissed before mouths to be fed,
And there's many a tryst and there's many a bed,
There's a lot I'll have missed but I'll not have been dead when I die!
And a person should celebrate everything passing by.

And I shall marry the miller's son.

Despite my references to Candide, which might mislead you, the Jesuits (who, despite my choice of link, are not in Britain alone) didn't get their hands on me during my formative years. At different distances, one of which became in-person contact (and no, I'm not telling which), Sondheim, Seuss, Keats (for whom I was far too young), Shelley & Co. (and yes, I know Keats to have been amongst them), Gorey, Addams and Thurber did. They didn't get their hands on me, but they got their words and music and images in me, and those seethed into and rewrote my DNA.

The same thing happened at later stages, with different artists, of course. (Shall we discuss visuals and Andy Goldsworthy, who is worth far more than gold? For a moving visual, look here.)

People get bickery about show music and I'm sure to cause the turning up of no few noses, citing a lyricist as a poet (There's worse to come, darlings. The bonnie blog is young, but a-growin'.), but Sondheim is far more than a hack lyricist -- and well-crafted songs are poems with more layers, nothing less or more.

Sondheim's words and music do much for me, even after the hundredth hearing. The day Pacific Overtures touches nothing in me, I shall no longer be me.

Call 'The Miller's Son' (sung by Petra in A Little Night Music) a pivotal influence. If you haven't heard it, then you can sample what you're missing here. I'll wait until you're back.) (Do you need a breather?)

'The Miller's Son' is primal and passionate, a full-blooded and throated vocalised urge, a rowdy behest for the living of life -- not a prayer for for mercy, but for full-on, 'Don't just embrace it; take it home and have its children' life. It puts down its glass, leans forward over its comfortably wide-spread legs (bugger conformity) and says, 'Jaayyysus, ya daft fool. Go do it.' Had Petra been Penelope, Ulysses would have had a shorter journey. That Petrafied Penelope wouldn't have waited at home. She'd have gone out there and brought back her man, leaving some sore and bewildered Sirens and other problems in the back-end of her path.

Shifting mythologies and legends and lores for a moment, the miller's son is no bad bargain. Puss in Boots worked with him.

Returning to Petra: She's a pragmatist. Babies make messes. Princes move in other strata (although they, too, come to beds at night). The road is short but this girl isn't going to creep or crawl (although she certainly plans to fumble). She's going to kick up her well-rounded heels and dance her way to the far end, however near or far it may be. And the gods have not invented that good night into which this girl is going to go gently. She's going to go out of life just the way she came into it and precisely the way she lived it while she was here: every pore open, each sense ready and every bit alive right up to the instant after the last exhalation. And I have no idea who's going to help anybody who gets in her way on this or any other side. Any song that gets that vitality pulsing through a hearer is doing a service for far longer than the timespan of a poem, with or without a score.