10.1.14

Clive James recently hove into my consciousness because of the stunning and sad personal elegy he created in the poem Japanese Maple that was featured in the New Yorker. It is more stunning and sad because it's true, the Australian poet is terminally ill. 

Japanese Maple 

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.

Slate's "Culture Blog" has a thorough analysis, and I think Katy Waldman does a better job than I could.  His website features more of his work, and I wanted to share just a little more of his time on earth. As you could imagine, death is the salient theme of his recent poems. Winter Plums shares the poetic perspective of the speaker looking out on his surroundings and shading them against his days and his days against them. Today I learned this style is called "Valedictory" poetry, from the Latin for farewell (that puts our graduation addresses in new light)

Two winter plum trees grow beside my door.
Throughout the cold months they had little pink
Flowers all over them as if they wore
Nightdresses, and their branches, black as ink
By sunset, looked as if a Japanese
Painter, while painting air, had painted these

Two winter plum trees. Summer now at last
Has warmed their leaves and all the blooms are gone.
A year that I might not have had has passed.
Bare branches are my signal to go on,
But soon the brave flowers of the winter plums
Will flare again, and I must take what comes:

Two winter plum trees that will outlive me.
Thriving with colour even in the snow,
They’ll snatch a triumph from adversity.
All right for them, but can the same be so
For someone who, seeing their buds remade
From nothing, will be less pleased than afraid?

I am attracted to this work because of the consistent rhythm, and the tonic of rhyme. The mere presence of rhyme seems to be controversial today (it certainly seems rare), and I imagine some critics would toss a piece offhand if it had such consistent dedication to rhyme, but James' work is a great resolution for the ear without being heavy-handed or too directed by where the rhyme needed to go. Since he is speaking to endings, it seems meet that the sonic resolution to satisfy the ear would be a feature of his work. 

In addition to poetry, Clive wrote literary criticism, essays, appeared on television programs, wrote non-fiction works, translated The Divine Comedy, produced shows for radio, and collaborated with musicians. Our society has a bit of trouble dealing with death (perhaps artists have less trouble?), perhaps James' contributions can help with that conversation. 

Event Horizon

For years we fooled ourselves. Now we can tell
How everyone our age heads for the brink
Where they are drawn into the unplumbed well,
Not to be seen again. How sad, to think
People we once loved will be with us there
And we not touch them, for it is nowhere.

Never to taste again her pretty mouth!
It’s been forever, though, since last we kissed.
Shadows evaporate as they go south,
Torn, by whatever longings still persist,
Into a tattered wisp, a streak of air,
And then not even that. They get nowhere.

But once inside, you will have no regrets.
You go where no one will remember you.
You go below the sun when the sun sets,
And there is nobody you ever knew
Still visible, nor even the most rare
Hint of a face to humanise nowhere.

Are you to welcome this? It welcomes you.
The only blessing of the void to come
Is that you can relax. Nothing to do,
No cruel dreams of subtracting from your sum
Of follies. About those, at last, you care:
But soon you need not, as you go nowhere.

Into the singularity we fly
After a stretch of time in which we leave
Our lives behind yet know that we will die
At any moment now. A pause to grieve,
Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,
And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.

What is it worth, then, this insane last phase
When everything about you goes downhill?
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze
And feel its grandeur, even against your will,
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live or else nowhere.