cartoon comment on Gilbert's The End of Paradise

[caption: "Any chance we could stop by my broker's house?" The New Yorker, November 16, 2009, p. 76]

Let me re-post Jack Gilbert's amazing poem (for Gilbert, it was of course the women in his life, not the broker)

THE END OF PARADISE

When the angels found him sitting in the half light

of his kerosene lamp eating lentils, his eyes widened.

But all he said was could he leave a note. The one

wearing black looked at the other one in red who shrugged,

so he began writing, desperately. Wadded the message

into an envelope and wrote Anna on the front. Quickly

began another, shoulders hunched, afraid of them.

Finished and wrote Pimpaporn on it. Began a third

one and the heavy angel growled. “I have Schubert,”

the man offered, turning on the tape. The one in black

said quietly that at least he didn’t say “So soon!”

When the ink ran out, the man whimpered and struggled

to the table piled with books and drafts. He finished

again and scrawled Suzanne across it. The one in red

growled again and the man said he’d put on his shoes.

When they took him out into the smell of dry vetch

and the ocean, he began to hold back, pleading:

“I didn’t put on the addresses! I don’t want them to think

I forgot.” “It doesn’t matter,” the better angel said,

“they’ve been dead for years.”

~ Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven

**

It is hard to let go -- even of trivia, not to mention things of true importance.

Robert Cording has a poem that in part alludes to that, imagining a "half-way house" where the dying sort out their "last certainties." But the poem also takes note of the living, who must dispose of possessions once essential to the dead person. In the end, the survivors will also be sorting their memories, their "certainties" about the departed.

BETWEEN WORLDS

At the room’s threshold you paused

as if caught by the stillness at the heart

of grief’s sheer drop and, like Vermeer’s

woman holding up her empty scales

in the window’s light, you held the room’s

remote self-containment: the sadness

of failing light at the windows; the few

things no longer his – a ring of keys,

a wallet, some prayer books; the lamp

and clock on the side table; the rented

hospital bed, stripped now, that waited

like a bed in some halfway house

between worlds where the dying sift

through the last certainties that prop up

their lives, and then are gone, leaving

the dumbstruck living to weigh

an unthinkable life, a death, an empty room.

~ Robert Cording, Against Consolation

**