Lynch - Bodies in motion and at rest: [on metaphor and mortality]

BY THOMAS LYNCH

Poems

Skating with Heather Grace

Grimalkin & Other Poems

Still Life in Milford

Essays

The UndertakingLife Studies from the Dismal Trade

Bodies in Motion

AND AT REST

essays by

Thomas Lynch

W. W. Norton & Company
New York / London

This book is for

Tom, Heather, Michael and Sean,

and for

Mary Tata.

Gentlemen, songsters, off on a spree

Doomed from here to eternity.

Lord, have mercy on such as we,

Baa! Baa! Baa!

from The Whiffenpoof Song by MEADE MINNEGERODE ,
as derived from RUDYARD KIPLING

Sometimes I need loves answer to the question

about the breathing creatures and their pain.

I shouldnt be comfortable with the easy one

that claims the very daylight is a sign

of transubstantial warmth among the stars

though there was brightness over town and countryside.

from A Sign from Heaven in Loves Answer
by MICHAEL HEFFERNAN

E pur si muove!

(And yet it moves!)

GALILEO GALILEI , after his recantation

Contents

Acknowledgments

B ooks do not come into being on their own. The essays assembled here, while written in private, owe their being to a wider community of colleagues, neighbors, friends and family. In all these I have been richly blessed.

Apart from the editors of journals and newspapers who commissioned and published these pieces, I am also grateful to the many organizations that have invited me to speak from their particular lecterns. Such forums have been both proving grounds and field studies for my work. In addition to the colleges, universities and state and national funeral service associations that have made me feel welcome, I am grateful to Dean Alastair G. Hunter of the School of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, to the Last Acts Campaign and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to the New Jersey Hospice and Palliative Care Association, to the New York Citizens Committee on Health Care Decisions, to the Arvon Foundation, to the National Book Foundation, to the Before Columbus Foundation and to the Chautauqua Institution.

If not for the dedication of colleagues and staff at Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors, I would not be free to pursue these interests. To Edward Lynch, Wesley and Betty Rice, Ken Kutzli, Karen Kramb, Becca Ward, Norm Garnett, Matthew Sheffler, Ruth Gibson, Thelma Connely, Jack and Virginia Baker, George Woodworth, Timothy Lynch, Michael and Mary Howell, Julie Kenrick, Brigid Lynch, Michael Lynch, and Sean Lynch I am deeply appreciative, as I am to the communities we serve for the trust they continue to place in us.

To have friends who are poets is no bad thing. To Matthew Sweeney, A. L. Kennedy, Keith Taylor, Richard Tillinghast, Philip Casey, Dennis ODriscoll and Louise Guinness I am indebted for their valuable commentaries on this work, as I am to David Eason, the Reverend John Harris and the Reverend Jacob Andrews.

I am most especially indebted to the poet Michael Heffernan, whose friendship is dear to me and without whose tutelage I might never have taken up a writing life.

To have poets for editors is a gift. For Robin Robertson of Jonathan Cape in London and Jill Bialosky of W. W. Norton in New York I give daily thanks, as I do for Richard P. McDonough, my loyal agent and advocate.

Wilson Beebe, John Eirkson, the late Howard Raether and the Reverend Thomas Long have been generous with their insights into the place of the funeral in our culture and marketplace, as have Joseph Dumas, Lisa Carlson, Constancia Romilly and Benjamin Treuhaft.

In matters mortuary and familial, my chief consultant is my brother Patrick Lyncha great man entirely and the finest funeral director I know. In addition to his wisdoms, it is my good fortune to have those of Colonel Daniel Lynch and Christopher Lynch, the oldest and youngest of my brothers, respectively.

I am deeply indebted to the family and friends who have allowed me to write about their lives. Where necessary, in particular with regards to the local dead and their families, I have changed names or made composites of characters in an effort to protect their privacy.

The following dedications of individual essays are made with thanks: Bodies in Motion and at Rest to the memory of Ronald Willis; Bible Studies to Larry Keef and the men we meet with on Tuesday mornings at the Big Boy; The Way We Are to Marty P. and the friends we meet with on Sunday mornings at Maplegrove; Funerals-R-Us to the memory of Howard Raether; and The Oak Grove Imbroglio to Mary Jackson.

For my daughter, Heather Grace, and my sons Tom, Mike and Sean I give thanks to God; and to them I give thanks for all they have taught me about life.

The account I keep with Mary Tata is a gift like graceabundant, undeserved, permanent.

Credits

To the editors of Esquire, Harpers, Newsweek, The Daily Telegraph Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, The New York Times, The Times of London , the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, Poetry East, Fodors guides, the American Funeral Director, The Southern Review, The Cresset, and Witness, where the essays collected here, or portions of them, first appeared, the author is grateful.

Wombs first appeared in Body, an anthology edited by Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer, published by Bard in 1999.

Several of these essays were recorded in West Clare and Rotterdam for broadcast on BBC Radio 4 by Kate McAll, producer, to whom the author also wishes to make known his thanks.

For permission to reprint copyright material, the author and the publishers gratefully acknowledge the following:

Extracts from October Salmon by Ted Hughes, from New Selected Poems 19571994. Copyright 1995 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted with permission of Faber & Faber.

Extracts from In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden, from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems . Copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. and Faber & Faber.

Extracts from AudenesqueIn Memory of Joseph Brodsky by Seamus Heaney, with permission of the author.

Extracts from Not Your Muse by Paula Meehan, from Pillow Talk. Copyright 1994 by Paula Meehan. Reprinted with permission of Gallery Press, Co.

Extracts from A Sign from Heaven by Michael Heffernan, from Loves Answer. Copyright 1994. Reprinted with permission of Iowa University Press.

Extracts from Famous Last Words by Michael Heffernan, from The Cry of Oliver Hardy: Poems. Copyright 1979 by the University of Georgia Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

Extracts from Under Ben Bulben by W. B. Yeats, from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Fineran. Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. and A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.

Extracts from Time by Tom Waits, from Beautiful Maladies, used with permission of Jalma Music (ASCAP).

Extracts from Pony by Tom Waits, from Mule Variations, used with permission of Jalma Music (ASCAP).

Extracts from At 65 by Richard Howard, from Trappings: New Poems. Copyright 1999 by Richard Howard. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Introduction

P eople sometimes ask me why I write. Because, I tell them, I dont golf. This gives me two or three days a weekfive or six the way my brother was doing it before he had a midlife crisis and took up rollerblades. But a couple of days every week at least, with a few hours in them in which to read or write. Its all the same thing to me, reading and writing, twins of the one conversation. Were either speaking or are spoken to. And I dont drink. I did, of course, and plenty of it, but had to quit for the usual reasons. It got to where I was spilling so much of it. This gave me two or three nights a weekfive or six the way I was doing it at the endwith a few hours in them when things werent blurry. With some of those hours I would read or write. And I am married to an Italian woman with some French sensibilities and five brothers, so I am home most nights, and when Im not, I call. I sleep well, rise early, and since I dont do Tae Bo or day trading, I read or write a few hours each morning. Then I take a walk. Out there on Shanks mare, I think about what Im reading or writing, which is one of the things I really likeits portable. You dont need a caddy or a designated driver or a bag full of cameras. All you needs a little peace and quiet and the words will come to youyour own or the others. Your own voice or the voice of God. Perspiration, inspiration. It feels like a gift.