REELY'S POETRY BLOG

I have a couple of poems today from Hayden Carruth. Today is his 87th birthday (Happy Birthday!).

I was reading his poem, Prepare, which he wrote for his wife:

“Why don’t you write me a poem that will prepare me for your
death?” you said.
It was a rare day here in our climate, bright and sunny. I didn’t feel like
dying that day.
I didn’t even want to think about it — my lovely knees and bold
shoulders broken open, …
read the entire poem on his website

The poem doesn’t mention the afterlife per se. Still, I think about it when I read mostly anything about dying, and often I have wondered why so many religions teach that there is an afterlife, but yet when someone dies, no one seems to believe it. Perhaps it is the shock of permanent physical separation. You can think you’re prepared for it, but you never really are.

I just saw an episode of the TV series, House, with a segment on the same topic Friday evening. I’m not a fan of this show, featuring Hugh Laurie as the rakish doctor who finds it necessary to be a crusty snide cynic 24/7, but everyone puts up with it because he’s “the best doctor we have.” I have a sarcastic streak myself, but at least I have a sense of when it’s not appropriate and this character just doesn’t.

Being too preoccupied with my notebook to locate the clicker and change the channel, I listened to it and became interested when House is puzzled by a patient who sticks a knife in an electrical socket in an apparent suicide attempt. The patient tells House he was just trying to take a visit to the afterlife. House tells him there is no such thing. But the patient knows there is. This gets under House’s skin so much that he also sticks a knife in an electric socket. Does this strike you as absolutely 100% ludicrous? I know, but that is how TV series get: the longer they go on, the weirder they get. At the end of the show, House reveals he saw nothing in his comments to a dead patient.

So evidently, because the almighty Dr. House saw nothing, he can apprise his patients who believe in a hereafter that there is none, with a lot more authority. Like the patient, I wouldn’t believe him either. My own experiences have shown me that there is a hereafter, and I also know it is good. I would just assume if House saw nothing, the hereafter network would cancel him.

Back to Hayden Carruth, here’s another poem, The Cows At Night, you can hear on poets.org

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
listen to the whole poem

This has nothing to do with the afterlife at all. It just brought back a memory of the cows in Vermont, riding down the road with my grandfather, little city girl, and asking him if the cows slept standing up at night. He just laughed.