The Quarrel with Self

The Quarrel with Self

(Ne tibi supersis. May you not outlive yourself)

At sixty-two I seemed adrift

from what I took to be my gift,

observed with crude despondency

how colleagues aged round sixty-three,

slipped off toward eternity

(David Campbell, RFB),

because to be the thing they were

must choose some end of character

to match a process with a whole

that tried an image for the soul.

Ill-health’s our in-house artist, is

all egotist in its show-biz.

Forbodings played for me ad lib,

I quizzed the pain behind my rib,

lay patient on the doctor’s bed—

I could not see my way ahead,

but  churned convenient fatefulness

that seemed to give my fate finesse.

A chronic illness on the lung,

signalled who I was cast among,

Currer, Ellis, Acton Bell.

Nostalgia lay in feeling well.

Doc read my x-ray, ultra sound,

restored me to my native ground,

the ego’s sunny hemisphere

where self and self-regard cohere.

Campbell thought that health was linked

to how a poet was distinct—

I praise that fellow’s restive thought

to prise the nothings that are fraught

in every atom life provides,

and find there light and how it slides.

Yet why have life and do no good?

Why can’t my nearest self collude

to find renewal of that ore

ignites the time I’m living for?

You can’t dislike the time you’re in

must grant all time is genuine,

expects from each exquisite care

to treat whatever comes as fair.

Yet where life finds a failing pulse

does it vamoose to somewhere else?

I have no license for that call.

To think so is to think in small,

I have no right to set a death

against persistence of the breath,

must  take life’s fabric as its shown,

and live the thing I do not own,

which is the meaning I can’t see,

for all it means the life in me.

Alan Gould