OK, now I'll turn to The Elderly Battlefield Nurse,
and read a couple of poems which are
an extension of this death of the horror,
and the problem of this kind of death.
Taken out of a military context, not of a theological context.
Then let us look at a short lyric
poem dealing with the finding of someone you knew that was dead.
Which happened to me two years ago in Wisconsin.
A fellow instructor, who after a two weeks
Christmas vacation didn't come back to school.
And fearing that he might have hurt himself
and couldn't reach the phone, my wife and I went to locate him.
And I found him dead on the sofa.
Had been dead for three days.
And when the paper boy came to deliver papers,
thought that he was taking his afternoon nap.
He was forever.
And ironically, that afternoon I had been hunting.
It was about 20 degrees.
Beautiful clear blue sky, but an inch of snow on the ground.
It was good for tracking rabbits.
And I had telescopic sights on a rifle,
and I was searching for cotton tails.
It didn't hit anything.
But coming back that afternoon to find my friend dead,
as I look through the stone window
dividers he was framed in there as if I were
looking through a telescope.
And so I use that as the image of death.
Death, to me, in a naturalistic world
is, as it was to Stephen Crane, the gun that shoots you,
the bullet doesn't have your name on it.
At least if the bullet had your name on it,
you could feel halfway happy about it.
At least someone cared enough to put your name on it.
But Wally brown died at 34 of a heart attack.
And so this is what I find part of the horror in life.
It isn't as deep as a metaphysical horror, exactly.
He wasn't struggling against anything when he died.
In fact, he was correcting term papers.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is to him.
"Wally Brown, Instructor."
The major thing of the whole poem
actually is, as I mentioned, just
that one image of death as a telescope.
I just tried to reconstruct the scene that I've told you.
"Mine were the only snow tracks coming and going
like death calling.
Where an evening, fresh from the hunt,
I found you napping away your three day vigil forever.
Newspapers were rolled at the door
like papyrus of some terminal, officious proclamation.
Your house ablaze like a cathedral,
kept the neighbors and robbers away.
Term papers you settle down to read
were piled thick as Sears-Roebuck.
Everything tidied before your heart went out.
The front door was opened.
Were you waiting?
Your bloated pale body mooned through the storm window
dividers to shoot me through the eyes.
A theme in your clenched hand caught you drifting asleep.
Blue because of snow.
Blue sky because of sun, no clouds.
In the soft snow I had lain sighting cotton tails.
They waved their behind like truce flags
in innocent retreat.
I arose, left my other self there.
Returned from the hunt to find you.
See myself where we must follow, framed
in cross hairs of telescopic sights."