That is one vision of death.
I mean, that's the ultimate death.
Which is a horror to anyone, I think,
who considered it, isn't it?
To consider yourself as being dead.
Imagine yourself as dead.
As Marceau couldn't do it, I don't think we can.
It's almost philosophical probability
to really consider yourself as being dead.
I think we have that much of a hold on life
that we block it out of our mind somehow,
and the ultimate exact death is the most horrible vision
of all.
We don't need any puritanical visions of hell.
Death itself is hell.
The other kind of a death, which is perhaps even worse,
because Wally Brown couldn't worry about it whether I found
him or whether I really cared enough to write
a poem about him.
The other kind of a death, I suppose, is a life in death.
Where you go through life already,
for all practical purposes, being dead.
Where you have been turned off to life.
Turned off to the flesh.
Turned off to sex.
Turned off as a communicating human being.
And I've imagined this situation,
which is the title poem from this, "The Elderly Battlefield
Nurse."
And obvious players when we are at battlefield, where life
is to me the battlefield.
Where elderness means that phase of life for most people
in which death is approaching.
It is a problem to be worked out.
I met such a woman as the one that I describe here as far
as age.
And being as a teenager in war, I've
fictionalized her life a bit.
This woman from Albuquerque who died two days before I came
back from Wisconsin to Albuquerque, hoping
to talk to her again.
The poem had been published , in Britain and I wanted to see her
again.
Because at that time, she was almost 90 years old
and extremely anti-war and anti-Vietnam involvement.
And was staying alive at this point, I think,
almost because she was involved in what
was happening politically.
And worried about war casualties,
and things like that, which kept her alive almost to 90.
What I fictionalized about, obviously,
is another kind of a woman who on seeing
the horrors of battlefield and seeing men
with their legs blown off has been turned off
towards love, towards acceptance of life
for the rest of her life.
And in old age, thinks about it.
And then it is too late to go back,
and so she ends up with watering her flowers.
Trying to keep other things alive, but knowing it's
too late for her.
This is "The Elderly Battlefield Nurse."
This is the other vision of death.
Not like the "Wally Brown" poem, that is the ultimate horror.
But the other one, of course, is the elderly battlefield nurse
who has to live in herself.
And it's a dramatic monologue, she speaks--
"I did all my serious conversing in the fashionless Span-Am war.
Bandaging private parts before sensing what they were for.
I recuperated from the clean holes.
A finger could enter like a mole,
and sink down with Alice out of sight.
My body writhed on a sheetless bed,
outside my flesh for nights.
I stilled when the firing stoppered in their toy cork
guns.
My body's urgings also stopped.
I could have had the decorated pick of generals, either side.
If I piped up, I was married.
Faithful.
Continent.
All a lie.
Even privates mocked me when I cringed
beneath a wash basin of blood, amputated feet, a syringe.
On caskets, I fastened labels and dreamt screaming
of my own baby aborted on a table.
Moaning as I lay empty as a shell.
I thought once I might unwind the bandages
like hands on clocks.
Just start back before the fear.
Now I water flowers.
Moisture sinks.
We plant and never think of roots, yet all must drink.
My own body, steeped in sun, sat down, stone hard and clothed.
Perhaps the flesh can't quit.
I've come to learn too late.
The moisture in me is all gone.
I'll tend these dry firewheels and wait."