I cannot celebrate enough Jane Byers impeccable justesse in the endings to the poems in the Keen sequence in Acquired Community. Look at how poignant and yet defiant the ending of the last poem in the sequence, “Elegy”, is
But I don’t want to keen,
I want to live.
So did we.
If you want immortality, write a book
Your book falls apart in my hands.
Read others, including elegies.
Damn the elegy.
It took decades for all of us to plainly say
I love you to someone who is alive.
Eventually you will love
more of the dead than the living.
Of course, those who recall Laurie Anderson’s lyrics to Speak My Language (“Now that the living outnumber the dead”) would have a different take on finitude and the love of the dead. And by the way Byers is spot on, Michael Lynch’s book in its perfect binding falls apart in your hands. The glue dries and crumbles. There is no immortality through the book. There is also no guarantee that one will live to the point of loving more of the dead than the living. Destiny can claim the young before they age. There is some bad faith being peddled here. And if we back up to the strophes that link to this exchange we find a plurality of activities that are necessary to sustain community — and thus the poem itself betrays the privileged position of the wisdom of the ending. The end is not the end.
I love the gay community.
Our community.
What have you done to help our community?
We forged our own families of choice,
created bonds of affection not blood,
celebrated sex, helped each other die.
But I don’t want to keen,
I want to live.
And so on until the end. I am not fine with that exclusionary “we” — it cannot be recuperated by a half-hearted intimation of mortality. Read others is the imperative embedded earlier. And so I will turn to Lorna Crozier The Garden Going on Without Us, “Even the Dead”
Even the dead reach for you
as you walk, so beautiful,
across the earth.
[…]
The bouquets in your room
are the hands of the dead,
transmuted. Roses.
[…]
Even the dead bless you.
Their blossoms glow
like muted lanterns
lighting your way
as you walk
green paths of sleep.
Quite a different sensibility than the Protestant-tinged guilt tripping of the ghost in Jane Byers (in an earlier poem in the sequence the ghost admits that “Religion gave me stories / and a place to put my rage”). But Crozier’s transmuted dead are in keeping with that very same raging ghost’s notions about transfiguration. Just needs a return to a more expansive notion of dancefloor. The end is not the end. On this I am quite keen. And a duet is not a dialogue.
And so for day 2289
20.03.2013
