Rage,rage against the dying of the light

(DBR)

O Rose thou art sick: Can you think back? We’re due on the Marchioness, at that party*.
How many drowned? Fifty? Fifty-one?
You’re stricken with nausea; I leave you stewing on the sofa, vomiting
Into a yellow plastic bucket – and went out on the pull. God! I was a selfish brat.
Your sickness could’ve saved our lives on that dark noisy night.                    

Later was Exeter – for your family; mischievously you reel off A Shropshire Lad
To me as driving by the beautiful Devon youth from the station to your home.
Watering your garden one autumn evening, I reflect how easy it is to spray health on
Columbines, mallow, the mocked pink rose mass growing hard against the back fence.
Envisaging you sickly upstairs, staying unwatered in bed, thinking
- Damn you! Retching, belching – your death stuff,
I didn’t go up to see you, knew you wouldn’t want that – fiercely alive,
Even now - I was not let see how close it was. Your hose waters only what it will. And

In death’s dream kingdom you’re dying piecemeal. Spending our vodka fuelled nights disputing a line, a
word in one of my poems. Poetry and you; the reams march off your tongue as on parade in the space between us.
Languishing, my friend, my poetry languished alongside you. Lassitude felt more often,
Harder to gainsay, your final downfall drew end-wise. Then,                    

Steel blue-grey eyes glinting while re-living a lusty San Francisco encounter. Your eyes - so much life,
determined on staying ‘you’; more life there than any who not near as close.
The eyes finally dying on you.
Illness brought you back to London, but like a true ill wind nothing good came for anyone.
I went in pursuit of you one day, you weren’t there. What staff tell me is you, this – this -
Curling wraith on the bed - not your bed – the bed - nurses who feed it, and who give its poo
A fair chance of getting out, clean up after ‘little accidents’, change its sheets - again bright,
Clinical white - this skeleton tight covered in pallid thinning skin, this is not you. But

Do not send for whom the bell tolls, such a dying though: the relicts of your glimmer,
Far too deep inhumed for us to notice. Still alight enough, perhaps, to mortify with this death’s
Simple viciousness. Not your word, stoical. Resentful, bitter, bloody plain angry about it!
– about dying. Your words, in them I heard dread. And

You, the you I knew, and loved with deepness as I’d rarely found, having a kip, the nurses’ say –
And how duck’s arse tight you are, a cigarette lent you expected back. Only you! A teabag drying on the
drainer for a second cup. – Kip. The final, vile kip on this Earth.  I smile next to you,
It isn’t shared. Though I understand aright this,
My fond embrace won’t be disinhumed - who is to make my poems poetry now? -  in this place. 

*

‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas

‘O Rose thou art sick’
The Sick Rose, William Blake

‘In death’s dream kingdom’
The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot

‘Do not send for whom the bell tolls’
Meditations No. 17, John Donne

A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Houseman


* The Marchioness : a pleasure boat hired for a private birthday party in 1989, run down by another boat and capsized; of 131 guests, 51 drowned.