John Updike

三月十六号一期的《纽约客》上，登了John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) 几首诗。最后一首是12月22日，离他去世只有一个月多一点时间。

他得的是肺癌，所以他知道自己的末日即将来临。这几首诗放在一起，题目就叫Endpoint. 终结之点。还不能说是终点。终点像是一场游戏，一场比赛，到达终点之后，还可以重新来过。而 Endpoint就是终结了，结束以后，就再也没有了。

诗人好像都死得匆忙，以前还没有太读到像这样，从容地，无奈地，耐心地等待着死亡的诗。就像诗人自己看着自己生命的烛火慢慢地转弱，熄灭，摸着自己的身体，感觉着自己的身体慢慢变凉，生命一丝一丝的抽出去，然后手里还拿着一只笔，慢慢地将这缓慢的死亡写出诗意。

网上的还不能公开读到，正好今天上完班、料理完家务还有一丁点儿精力，那一丁点儿精力却又不够认真读书写字，就顺便敲出他的两首诗吧。都是波士顿的景色，原来从一个行将就木的老人眼里看去，深秋的，冬天的波士顿，竟是这样的荒凉。他自己也说了：

I had to move
to beautiful New England--its triple
deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets--
to learn how drear and deadly life can be.

有人说他的风格是 playful seriousness, 我看，说 serious playfulness好像也可以。

Hospital
Mass. General, Boston, November 23-27, 2008

Begign big blond machine beyond all price,
it swallows us up and slowly spits us out
half-deafened and our blood still dyed: all this
to mask the simple dismal fact that we
decay and find our term of life is fixed.
This giant governance, a mammoth toy,
distracts us for the daytime, but the night
brings back the quiet, and the solemn dark.

God save us from ever ending, though billions have.
The world is blanketed by foregone deaths,
small beads of ego, bright with appetite,
whose pin-sized prick of light winked out,
bequeathing Earth a jagged coral shelf
unsee beneath the black unheeding waves.

-------------

My visitors, my kin. I fall into
the conversational mode, matching it
to each old child, as if we share a joke
(of course we do, the dizzy depths of years),
and each grandchild, politely quizzing them
on their events and prospects, all the while
suppressing, like an acid reflux, the lack
of prospect black and bilious for me.

Must I do this, uphold the social lie
that binds us all together in blind faith
that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength,
as in a motion picture which, once seen,
can be rebought on DVD? My tongue
says yes; within, I lamely drown.

--------------

I think of those I loved and saw to die;
my grampop in his nightshirt on the floor;
my first wife's mother, unable to take a bite
of Easter dinner, smiling with regret;
my mother in her blue knit cap, alone
on eighty acres, stuck with forty cats,
too weak to walk out to collect the mail,
waving brave goodbye from her wind-chimed porch.

And friends, both male and female, on the phone,
their voices dry and firm, their ends in sight.
My old piano teacher joking, of her latest
diagonosis, "Curtains." I brushed them off,
these valorous, in my unseemly haste
of greedy living, and now must learn from them.

-------------

Endpoint, I thought, would end a chapter in
a book beyond imagining, that got reset
in crisp exotic type a future I
--a miracle!--could read. My hope was vague
but kept me going, amiable and swift.
A clergyman--those comic purveyors
of waht makes sense to just the terrified--
has phoned me, and I loved him, bless his hide.

My wife of thirty years is on the phone.
I get a busy signal, and I know
she's in her grief and needs to organize
consulting friends. But me, I need her voice;
her body is the only locus where
my desolation bumps against its end.


The City Outside
December 11, 2008

Stirs early: ambulances pull in far
below, unloading steadily their own
emergencies, and stray pedestrians
cross nameless streets. Traffic picks up at dawn,
and lights in teh skyscrapers dim.
The map of Beacon Hill becomes 3-D,
a crust of brick and granite, the State House dome
a golden bubble single as the sun.

I lived in Boston once, a year or two,
in furtive semin-bachelorhood. I parked
a Karmann Ghia in Back Bay's shady spots
but I was lighter then, and lived as if
within forever. Now I've turned so heavy
I sink through twenty floors to hit the street.

----------

I had a fear of falling: airplanes
spilling their spinning contents like black beans;
the parapets at Rockefeller Center or
the Guggenheim proving too low and sucking
me down with impalpable winds of dread;
engorging atria in swank hotels,
the piano player miles below his music,
his intrument no bigger than a footprint.

I'm safe! Away with travel and abrupt
perspectives! Terra firma is my ground,
my refuge, and my certain destination.
My terrors--the flight through dazzling air, with
the blinding smash, the final black--will be
achieved from thirty inches, on a bed.

------

Strontium 90--is that a so-called
heavy element? I've been injected,
and yet the same light imbecilic stuff--
the babble on TV, newspaper fluff,
the drone of magazines, banality's kind banter--plows ahead,admixed
with world collapse, atrocities, default,
and fraud. Get off, get off the rotten world!

The sky is turning that pellucid blue
seen in enamel behind a girlish Virgin--
the doeskin lids downcast, the smile demure.
Indigo cloud-shreds dot a band of tan;
the Hancock Tower bares a slice of light.
So where the world's beauty? Was I deceived?