and the 2014 rewrite simpler still. ‘Old People In Hospital’ appears here exactly as I wrote it in 1984, when I was an observer rather than an insider.
The other poems were written throughout 2014 and 2015, and are arranged not in order of their composition but in their appropriate place in the narrative of losing and grieving for Eva.
Michel Faber
Fearn, 2016
I
Of Old Age, In Our Sleep
Although there is no God, let us not leave off praying;
for words in solemn order may yet prove to be a charm.
Sickness swarms around us, scheming harm,
plotting our ruin behind our back.
Let us pray we may escape attack.
We do not fear to die, to ebb away.
What we fear is endless days
of torture,
forced intimacy
with a body that is not our own;
carnal knowledge
of our cunning abuser, our disease,
who fears no medicine
and hears no pleas.
Let us not leave off praying.
Let us keep our dream close to our heart:
that life is too high-principled
to linger when it should depart.
Yes, let us not leave off praying.
Not for God our soul to keep
but just to die, of old age, in our sleep.
Old Bird, Not Very Well
By the side of the road she stands:
old bird, not very well.
Will she cross? – Yes, perhaps,
in a bit, when the tiredness
passes.
I walk as if on eggshell,
to delay the flit of her wings.
But closer by, step by step, then eye to eye,
I see there will be no such thing.
This bird is waiting
patiently to die.
I am in awe of seeing a bird like this,
standing upright in extremis.
We think of birds in two states only:
dead already; death-defying.
Feathered carnage, or still flying.
Finding her, I know I’ve stumbled
on a moment in a million:
a moment even ornithologists
may never witness:
an old bird, on the point of dying.
Humbled, I intrude on her distress,
her mute, attentive helplessness.
I sit with her a while,
a hundred times her size.
My shoe-heel comes to rest
inches from her breathing breast.
My shadow lassos her personal space:
all that remains of her domain.
Yesterday, the unbounded sky; today
only a fringe of dirt
for massive cars to pass.
One loose feather, scarcely bigger than her eye,
flaps, passive, as they rustle by.
She keeps eerily still,
on the very edge
of no longer being a sparrow.
On the brink
of no longer thinking
birdy thoughts.
Lucky
In late ’88, not knowing how lucky I was,
I met a woman who would die of cancer.
I looked into her eyes, and did not see
the dark blood that would fill them when
the platelets were all spent.
All I saw was hazel irises, keen intelligence,
a lick of mascara on the lashes she would lose.
I thrilled to the laugh that pain would quell,
admired the slender neck before it swelled,
and, when she gave herself to me,
I laid my cheek against a cleavage
not yet scarred by venous catheters.
Tenderly I stroked the hair
which was, at that stage, still her own.
I spread her legs, put weight upon her ribcage,
without a worry this might break her bones.
I’d gaze, enchanted, at her naked back, the locus
for the biopsies to come.
Hurrying to meet her in the street,
I’d smile with simple pleasure just to glimpse
my darling who would gladly swallow
pesticide for her future drug regime.
I ran the last few steps to hug her,
squeezing
