I went to see him. He was old then
And laughed at what he forgot and found
As if out of thin air, his mind elsewhere.
The ground floor flat not anywhere
He'd call home but where he lived happily enough.
It had never been the plan. And yet to me
The books, the tall window and the view,
The few paintings, landscapes by his wife,
And by his daughter, his eagerness for me
To listen with him for more than an hour
To Shostakovich's '24 Preludes & Fugues'
Seemed an idyll of an enviable kind, a script
I'd write for myself for when things fall apart
Piecemeal like that late autumn afternoon.
He'd showed me what he'd kept, letters from
Great poets he'd known, old photographs
Of himself and X, and Y, some manuscripts
That had come his way, his own books
And those by others in his long-gone world.
The rest he said was archived somewhere,
Which seemed to cut him short, until suddenly:
'Dying is for the living,' he exclaimed, keenly,
Something he liked to say, 'There's no future
In posterity.' I'd heard the same before, and
'Never look to be wise. Speak your mind.
Wisdom is for fools.' And then he rose
That we should neither outstay his welcome.
A bloom of wine hung in my lungs long after
I got home and his talk of Cold War days
Ran on like a newsreel in my head until
That flicker and flap as the spool reaches its end
And I sat on a moment in the dark, moved
By a sudden understanding of my life.
ANDREW McNEILLIE
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