A Dying Poet

Jadis, si je souviens bien, ma vie était un festin ou s'ouvraient tous les coeurs,

 ou tous les vins coulaient.

 

From Une Saison En Enfer by Arthur Rimbaud

 

 

'What thou lovest well remains,

                                the rest is dross

What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee'

 

                                From Canto LXXXI of The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound

 

 

A Dying Poet

 

 

Rimbaud got away; he got out young.

With a second Saison en Enfer, he travelled delirious, back to France from Abyssinia. A torturous journey, overland on a rude litter, typically reserved for the dead. By sea left for days unattended without food or water.

 

The last of the dross burnt away.

His leg amputated in hospital in Marseilles.

 

A heated arrival at Roche met with the same cold censure, reserved for her 'profligate son', although a little sister had grown up, sympathetic, someone to talk to, to tell his amazing tales. A mother grown yet even harder, more small.

 

He would have to leave all over again.

He could not die there in that place.

 

Isabelle would bring him poppy-seed tea, made from their garden flower bed to ease the horrid pain and incessant fever. The floor of his little room covered with woven prayer mats he'd brought with him from Harar. They said he would recite strange 'oriental verses', as in a trance. One night woken from a dream having forgotten his condition sprang from his bed to see through an open window the moon rise luminous and fell crashing to the floor.

 

He had, like his father, whom he'd never met, who while stationed in Algeria as a Legionnaire governor learnt Arabic and made an early translation of Qur'an into French, also learnt Arabic and with the assistance of his house servant, Djami, they would recite. Djami married a girl from the local village, and at twenty became a young father to a little daughter, a little light, like playful fireflies in the night. And so he would often speak of his faithful friend, who he dearly loved, sometimes calling Isabelle by his name, and how he wanted to return to Africa with a bride and have a family. After a short month lasting a near eternity he set off by train with his sister accompanying him. He was by all accounts terribly unwell, unfit for even the shortest trip let alone an arduous and now impossible journey back to Africa. In Paris they had to change stations and continue on to Lyon, then another train to Marseilles. Upon his arrival he was immediately brought to the hospital of the Immaculate Conception, which he would never leave. The doctors told Isabelle that any hope of recovery was futile and the end was near. They, on the other hand, fed Arthur unpalatable encouragement. Whenever he was conscious his sister would work on him to convert to Catholicism, and accept the holy Sacrament. What stale bread for a sublime poet whose visions poured from the Unseen. 

 

 

                                                Robert Luongo