Shirley, at 87
“Let’s not talk about what all the others are taking about,”
whispers Shirley, conspiratorially.
It is New Year’s Eve. Alex is in the “community room” of his new apartment complex.
He and Shirley (b. 1935) are making headway on a jigsaw puzzle (“Christmas Cookies”)
in front of the flickering flames of an electric fireplace.
Others from the complex are gathered around tables chatting and card playing.
“Demagoguery? Global war? The end of the world?” suggests Alex.
“Themselves,” says Shirley.
“How can you tell they are all talking about themselves?” asks Alex.
“It stands to reason, doesn’t it?” offers Shirley. “It’s all they know, most of them.”
“It’s all I know,” agrees Alex. “I don’t know enough to talk about anything else.”
“Oh, you know plenty,” scoffs Shirley. “You are a poet. Poets know everything.”
Alex lifts a puzzle piece, examines its frosting, and fits it into place.
“You have eagle eyes,” commends Shirley. “Here, try this one.”
Shirley is 86 years old. Alex’s current apartment is a “seniors” complex. Is Alex a senior?
The city government paperwork he had to fill out does label him so.
It is all on the up-and-up this aging process
(it is exactly what it had seemed, all along, to be)
and the long-term prognosis is immutable. Aging and death, aging and death.
They go together like birth and (first) breath.
Alex is 63 years old, retired, and living on a pension.
His apartment is subsidized because Alex is classified as “low-income.”
He had worked all his working life as a librarian in the basement of a university library.
In gratitude for his years of service
he had been allowed to keep his health and dental benefits.
No small thing in a culture of, sometimes, criminal insensitivity
to the vicissitudes of the ailing.
“We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
whereof comes, in the end, despondency and madness,” Alex thinks to recite.
“William Wordsworth!” declares Shirley. “His mind was marvelous. Anyhow,
he had enough intellectual wherewithal to steal all the best lines
from his sister Dorothy’s, diaries and wrap his poems around them.”
“How do you know Wordsworth?” asks Alex.
“Those were the poets we studied in high school,” declares Shirley.
“Keats and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley.”
“The Romantics,” affirms Alex.
He doesn’t like to admit how much the Romantics meant, to him,
at an early point in the development of his poetic sensibilities. The lyric effusion
is what principally attracted his attention. The excited clarity of their, then, new language
of spirit—expressed mainly via metaphors from nature.
“Was Wordsworth your favorite?” Alex asks.
“Good lord, no. It was Coleridge for me.
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” replies Shirley.
“Certain of Coleridge’s rhymes, in that poem, are as memorable as anything
in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” offers Alex, adding, off-the-cuff,
by way of example:
“Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion.
As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”
“Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink,” Shirley calls back, instantly,
from across the puzzle table. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”
Now it is a celebration! Alex is thinking. Now it is a party!
As if in proof, unbidden to his language center, this quatrain, by Khayyam, stops by:
“Some, for the glories of this world, sigh, and some for the prophet’s paradise to come.”
Ah, take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the rumble of a distant drum,”
quotes Alex.
Shirley is delighted. “If there has ever been a time for that poem, it is this night, tonight,”
she declares. Shirley has the hilarious bravura of a precocious teenager.
She rises from her chair and claps her hands together, one time, sharply,
then dances an energetic, shake-off-the-past, jig.
“Wordsworth,,Shelley, Keats and Coleridge,
which, when young, did this rebel roll with?
Samuel or John or William or Percy,
to which, when young, did I extend my mercy?” sings Shirley.
The more puzzle pieces one places, the easier, to place, the puzzle pieces become.
The underlying framework of this very poem, for example,
has rendered this very line, with these very words, inevitable.
New Year’s Eve, 2022. Alex stands on his chair and calls for silence. When
none is forthcoming he declares into the din: “Poets, as Shelley wrote,
are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I think we can all agree
to, at least, that much. Furthermore, let the record show that
the capacity of an individual to dwell in uncertainty and doubt,
without any irritable reaching after facts and reason,
is the proof, either, of their capacity for nuanced theological understanding
or of the capaciousness of their faith. Recording angel? Will you read that back to me?”
By the time Alex has concluded his speech there is silence in the room.
“It’s Keats,” explains Shirley to the silent room.
“An idea of his called Negative Capability.”
Alex nods. Still standing on his chair he turns to Shirley and asks:
“Is it just me, or is this the best New Year’s Eve party ever thrown?”
“John Keats?” offers Shirley, again, to the room. “Anyone?”
The next moment, one of the silent elders falls off his chair.
He is lying on the floor, like a beached fish, gasping.
Alex steps down from his rise and dials 911.
“Nine, one, one,” an operator answers, “what is your emergency?”
On Keats’ gravestone, the epitaph reads:
This grave contains
all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet
Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies,
Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone:
Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.
When Alex reminds Shirley of this, she tells him everyone in the world
should engrave that culminating line onto their tombstones.
And into their hearts.
“Here stand we whose names are writ in water,” agrees Alex.
No clinging to identity. However profoundly constructed.
That is the whole arrangement. That is the bargain we have struck,
in exchange for being born.
