The day that Suzie drove us out to get
The lobsters at the lobster place at the cove:
Bill Moran in the passenger seat of the car,
Doubled up as if in a fit of laughter,
A paroxysm of helpless, silent laughter,
At the joke the Parkinson’s had played on him.
The big joke he simply couldn’t get over.
*
Bill Moran at breakfast time, in the kitchen,
Bent double in his wheel chair, his chin almost
Touching the kitchen table, and his eyes
Intently studying a piece of toast,
A just discovered, as yet unreadable
Mesopotamian language, not related
To Akkadian or Sumerian, much older
Even than what he knew about already—
The great old man with his ferocity
Of tenderness and joy, his eyes intently
Studying the text. He sent me once
A passage copied from Nietzsche’s book Daybreak:
“It is a connoisseurship of the word;
Philology is that venerable art
That asks one thing above all other things:
Read slowly, slowly. It is a goldsmith’s art,
Looking before and after, cautiously;
Considering; reconsidering;
Studying with delicate eyes and fingers.
It does not easily get anything done.”
Bill looking for heaven on the tabletop.
*
After the funeral Suzie said, “Bill thought
He’d be flying around up there somewhere forever.”
And he could fly. After breakfast that day
We wheeled him away from the kitchen table and into
The living room and there was a frame contraption
Set up on long thin cranelike legs. It looked
Like something in a children’s playground, with
A canvas sling to carry him through the air
From the wheel chair to another chair; heartbreaking,
Swaddled, small, ridiculously like
A newborn baby. Or else the sling resembled
Those slings you see on television when
They rescue people from their sinking boats
And carry them up under the angel wings
To safety in the helicopter noise.
—David Ferry
David Ferry’s most recent book is The Epistles of Horace: A Translation. In 2001 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
