[Oe List ...] Gordon's November update

[Paul Schrijnen via OE]

Dear Gordon,

Thank you for your uplifting and life and death affirming letter.

This poem by Clive James comes to mind.  He is an Australian poet, 
bon vivant and academic, living in Cambridge, UK and dying. 
This poem appeared last year in the New Yorker. 

Paul

Japanese Maple
BY CLIVE JAMES <http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/clive-james> 
 <> <>Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?


Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.



> On 14 Nov 2015, at 02:50, Timothy Wegner via Dialogue <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm posting this for Roxanna. See attachment for Gordon's November update.
> 
> Gordon wrote:
>  "OK, here's my latest--and final--version"
> 
> 
> <NovemberUpdate.pdf>_______________________________________________
> Dialogue mailing list
> Dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net
> http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net

Paul Schrijnen
13 Bloemfontein Avenue
London W12 7BJ
paulschrijnen at gmail.com <mailto:paulschrijnen at gmail.com>
+44 7973 206 766 
skype: paulus.schrijnen



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