In the Slender Margin by Eve Joseph

them. Over the years it became apparent to me that the dying regularly shove off from shore before untying the bowline. Some kick off blankets and remove their clothing, as if fighting their way back to the womb. Some turn to face the wall and disappear into an opening only they can see. It wasn’t until I read Jane Kenyon’s poem “Reading Aloud to My Father” that I understood the living, too, must play their part and resist the urge to haul the skiff back in:
    At the end they don’t want their hands
    to be under the covers, and if you should put
    your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
    of solidarity, they’ll pull their hand free;
    and you must honour that desire,
    and let them pull it free.
    When family members struggled with a perceived rejection, it was sometimes helpful to suggest that their loved one was not turned away from them as much as turned towards something else. It was necessary to learn to read the body; to differentiate between physical pain and other kinds of suffering. To know when to intervene and when to stand back and let the dying sort through whatever it was they were working out.
    If it is close to impossible to translate the music at the heart of poetry, then the same must be said for any attempts to precisely translate the dying process. The word
translation
derives from the Latin
translatus
, meaning “to bring over, carry over.” To
translate
is “to remove from one place to another.”
    Seen in this light, death itself is an act of translation.
    “Poetry’s fertility,” writes Jane Hirshfield, “lives in the marriage of the said and the unsaid, of languaged self and unlanguaged other, of the knowable world and the gravitational pull of what lies beyond knowing.” We can interpret the physical signs of dying, but there remains an element of the untranslatable in both poetry and dying. A mystery at the heart of both. Something only the dying know.
    The elegiac nature of poetry is derived from human grief. If poetry is how we speak to the dead, and if metaphor is the language that waits for us at the end, it is poets who help usunderstand death, because they are using that language now. The poet listens to water, to the wind, to the back alleys of sweltering cities; she sees the old fence falling down and hears the first nail that was driven into it; she attempts to sit with what is and not what she assumes something to be. The poet makes great leaps from the known world into the unknown, from the rational to the irrational, the steady to the unsteady. The dying, too, make great leaps from the known to the unknown, from the rational to the symbolic.
    I inherited a dark forest, but today I am walking in the other forest, the light one.
We are, all of us, walking along with the poet Tomas Tranströmer in a forest of light. It will not always be so.
     
    In the days and hours before an expected death, many people enter a kind of altered state. It is clear, when you look at them, that they are looking through you to something else. A story is told about the time W. H. Auden, walking across the grounds at Oxford, immersed in a discussion about poetry with a group of students, had to be guided by one of them around a gaping hole in the ground. Teased about this, Auden is reported to have said, “I am not absent-minded, I am present-minded elsewhere.”
    The Talmud teaches that unborn children are in a holy state. They are visited, in the womb, by the angels of light and sadness and taught the Torah and the secrets of creation. Just before they are born, Purah, the angel of forgetfulness, taps them over the lips and they forget everything, but an echo stays
in the deep stronghold of the heart.
If birth is a kind offorgetting, could dying be a kind of remembering? Are the dying present-minded elsewhere?
    When we leave, is there a stream of light that continues for a while after we’re gone? When we observe the crab nebula, for example, we are seeing it not as it is now, but how it was