Unbecomings #2

Poet Paul Smyth: “Death asks us nothing, nothing at all, and yet / We ache to answer death with something true, / A voice will force its little rivulet / Of syllables over silence.”

The timeless. The temporal. Both self and ever more of the past ongoing, old(er) writers take note. Storytellers, John Berger argued, are “Death’s Secretaries.” What they create is, if not more permanent than experience, possessing a bit more longevity.

Whatever a writer might have in mind, however, in “Dark Song” A. R. Ammons cautioned that “the / old, departing, / can confer / nothing.”

The struggle against artistic extinction. But in the end? At the end? André Gide, author of more than fifty books, died at age eighty-one. A few days before, he wrote,

No, I cannot assert that with the end of this notebook all will be finished; that all will be over. Perhaps I shall have a desire to add something. To add something or other. To make an addition. Perhaps. At the last moment, to add something still. . .Do I still have something to say? Still something or other to say?

And what might that be? My mother wrote, “Apology will be my death / The poet said beneath her breath, / Unless death one day prove to be / My only true apology.”