On the western shore

We spent some of this day reading aloud the “final poems” of Ursula K. LeGuin, written when she was between the ages of 84 and 88, submitted to her publisher seven days before she died. The book is So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018 (Copper Canyon, 2018). Aging is the recurring subject of these poems: flaming out, drifting out to sea, raging, laughing (at herself and others) collapsing into the all-that-is, “the earth/ that joins us all.” 

When I went searching for a book to take to the ocean with us, I found many poems about love (requited and unrequited), betrayal, identity, the quest to know oneself, the struggle to find one’s voice or to be acknowledged, to change the world, to make a mark. No, no, not what I was looking for. 

LeGuin, in her “ninth decade,” her eighties, knows herself. “The little stone my mind,” she writes, “slips into the cloudy pond.” She has been acknowledged and celebrated, has sold thousands of books, but “The wire/ gets higher/ and they forget/ the net.” She misses “the many that I was” and longs to be freed of “this stale sink of age and ills.”

Some of the poems are rhymed, playful, ironic. She asks, “What does it mean to say/ I am that child in the photograph/ at Kishamish in 1935?” Might as well say she is “flicker of shade and sunlight/ as the wind moves through the leaves” with “a voice like wind in sand.” 

Sue and I laughed, cheered, saluted LeGuin, from whom Sue took a writing workshop years ago. I blipped her in 2013, the year before she started writing these poems. 

After a time of reading and tending house, Sue and I headed out to the sand and the sea ourselves, the foggy misty sand, white sky, white sea. We had been longing for words to describe where we are in our lives, in the world, in the cosmos. Entering our ninth decade. “I am such a long way from my ancestors now/ in my extreme old age that I feel more one of them/ than their descendant.” Here are the words.