John Tagliabue: Last Words 18 comments

3 Jun 2006 @ 08:31, by Richard Carlson The important thing is to do, and nothing else; be what it may. ---Pablo Picasso You yourself are time---your body, your mind, the objects around you. Plunge into the river of time and swim, instead of standing on the banks and noting the course of the currents. ---Philip Kapleau Who whispered, souls have shapes So has the wind, I say. But I don't know. I only feel things blow. ---Stanley Kunitz John and Grace Tagliabue were photographed in the Muskie Garden at Bates College in 1998 by Phyllis Graber Jensen, shortly before their move to Providence, R.I. John died on May 31. You can, you do...prepare---sometimes for years---for the last word, the final departure...of a friend, a loved one. But we're never really ready when it comes. Still the shock. The welling up, unexpected sobbing. Breaking down...alone or with a comforting hand upon one's shoulder. It cannot be contained. The grief. And so it came...yesterday afternoon, while I was down at the garden, the phone call's recorded message telling me John Tagliabue is gone. Exactly a month ago his last letter arrived announcing the "big operation" would be "tomorrow morning, might take 4 - 7 hours!!" Nearly 83, John had agreed to extreme measures to remove part of a pancreas gone bad. There were complications...and another surgery...and then the final morphine drip. With wife and 2 daughters in the room reading him his poems, John gave us the slip and danced lightly further into the fantastic. May I share with you just a few of the last things he wrote? ++++++++++++++++++++ Dear sensitive thoughtful shaken one, Shakespeare student, praised actor, stirring one, Dick Carlson, I wanted to cheer myself up a bit so I remembered what Amy Clampitt wrote about me: "John Tagliabue writes out of a deeply sacramental sense of nature and history. He is, moreover, that rare person to whom poetry appears to come as naturally as breathing. It comes to this reader, poem by poem, as a Franciscan act of courtesy and praise." The Collected Poem I didn't want to be an entertainment commodity a seminar commodity an attitude to be approved of by this fashion or that ideology I had no plans or programs or theories for it but it was from my heart of no importance of all importance it was not to be named or foretold it alone gave me freedom. Particularity and some also call it freedom and Democracy Something in my biological nature (it must be cosmic ? ) wants me to get up and yawn and then pee and then have my 1st meal of the day, coffee, breakfast, and later more, day by day, mile by mile, to imbibe, to chew, to make faces and acts, to act up, to have more or less yearnings, how habitual ! to write phrases, millions of them, moods, billions of them, to listen to the more and more hideous world news, politics, economics, murders and murders, indeed one has to be strong, very strong, to get through the so called ordinary day year after year after year, and now it's almost 82 years that the biological and cosmic functions have been particular in me. Drizzle and repeating Success The delicate new leaves are certainly being visited by thousands of delicate rain drops day after day after day and the young bridegroom is visiting night after night and often in the daytime too the new young bride she of the delicate skin, hands sliding on the body, warmth in the ease, the curve of the young breast, the penetration of the mesmerized devout husband, he who plays like a light magician and musican on the instrument of bliss with the happy instrument of bliss and all around for miles and miles and forever are the necessary new blossoms flowerings, the drizzle and the continuous dizziness night after night day after day in the delicate celebration of marriage perfection. Master T.S. Eliot finely pronounced it the Waste Land From my lofty 4th floor window I see it, there goes off the 1st black car of the day, a man in a tin can gliding like a coffin, drizzle day, business day, from computer to computer, from sigh to sigh, poor trapped man industrious and trapped in his bureaucracy while more nuclear bombs are being prepared, more nuclear waste is being piled up, while more fresh young soldiers are being sent off to be slaughtered - for Democracy for Freedom for Wall Street for Corporation and Madness and More Corporations and Madness; some more coffins will glide by in Edgar Allen Poe's Country of Quote the Raven and Advertisements, Dental Ads and Viagra and Constipation Cures, More Advertisements for Cars and Cheerfulness in Routine Despair. and from the last letter...these 4~~~ And faith ? Certainly Charity They don't care about that - the frivolity, the foolishness, the insane ambitions of politics, illusions ridiculous of "power" - the Springtime daffodils, magnolia, blossoms of all kinds, they simply Appear, miraculously Appear; I ask you song of myself and friends not to disappear but be enlightened as the daffodils, as April thoughts of resurrection, baffle elate, not late, the future centuries with hope. All kinds at the bib, bibles, 1st and last suppers What are you going to do to make it, lo Spirito Santo ? the mosquito, the weed, the clown, the tormented philosopher, what ? Hamlet at the crossroads mumbling to the gravediggers, Christ on the Cross Exhausted, He who gave away His sermon on the Mount, He who said with Him we can move all mountains. Someone with a twinkle in his eyes and humored looked up from the spaghetti he was enjoying and said - good, you like to philosophize, you help us pass the time. Being is its own reward for being. Beauty is its own reward for being. Weeping is its own wet reward, I hear the pitter patter of the rain, it is twice blessed, it blesses him or her that gives and those who hear and see and sometimes sing; weep, O skies, you skies that Turner in his glory, that Tiepolo in his glory also and others, tried to paint; we faint from weeping, we fortunate to have loved and loved and loved. Skies could not be higher than we weeping. Sleep awhile, keep the secrets of what we call infinity. "The more I give, the more I have, for both are infinite..." Sensitive Observer, be a night in armor Watching the man on the Cross or the person at the dark or shattering light crossroads in pain or perplexity is great pain for the mother or lover, receiving the news of the agony or death, the amputation or blindness of the son or soldier perplexes agonizes as pain can do unto death; dear weeping daughter, tortured relative, if you must weep weep - not then sleep, awake and lifetime recollect all my thoughts and acts of love. John Tagliabue's last words to me were these~~~ What I know as I Approach 83 is that much is unknown & that I've had a most helpful wonderful wife & loved family & good friends (you are one of them - ); and I want to say thanks - & Best Wishes to us all John [link]

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