for Herb Creecy
Ten years ago I drove down to Barnesville
to see my friend, the artist Herb Creecy,
who was dying of pancreatic cancer.
He chose this way to end up: No hospital. Horse spittle. No chemo,
lots of painkillers, with his son Lee nearby to help out.
He calls his friends on the phone, tells them what is going on,
how he loves them a lot. If they can, they come down to see him,
like me, sleep on his couch, leave the next day.
He has one half a ceremonial sip of the wine I brought.
Pinot noir. No drinking.
We sit at the kitchen table and talk.
As I pull up to his place in the woods, he opens the screen door,
comes out on the porch. Looks like Auschwitz, huh?
We’ll just turn the mirrors to the wall. Who needs ’em.
He couldn’t talk but half an hour. Then he’ d have to lie down
on the couch with his hands across his chest.
You look like a Tibetan monk. I’m getting holy
here toward the end.
One of the things we talk about: how, born when we were,
we missed out on all the drugs the kids do now.
Then I remember. In 1957, same year I had my first beer,
sophomore in college. I lived in a house with Wilson Cooper,
Bucky Bernard, and Al Salley, whose father owned
the big drugstore in Asheville.
Al kept a stash of Demerol that he would use for staying up late
to study for exams. Nobody ever thought back then
of any recreational use. I tried one one night to study
for Russian Proseworks of the 19th Century. I found
an empty basement room in the Chemistry Building
across the street, disappeared into deep ecstatic calm
and let the connections come. I took another Demerol
before the exam the next morning. It was not unusual
for the professor to read to the class from such an exam
when he gave back the papers. The brilliantly original insights,
drug-wisdom. Then Creecy remembered doing the same thing,
but with a difference. When his Demerol kicked in,
he couldn’t stay indoors. He had to get out and look at things,
talk to people, anybody. I went in. He went out.
You are a scholar, Coleman!
He meant mystic, I think, but Creecy had no use
for such a word. I do love going in, or I used to.
Whatever that means. Now I love Creecy’s having to go out
and walk the night street—walking around and talking to people
is so fine. Creecy and I had good late night conversations,
about all manner of thing: art, the impulse that generates it.
He loved carping at hypocrisy. That sonofabitch . . .
I sort of like him. No hospital, no chemo, so brave.
I don’t know if I will be up for that. We shall see.
I am such a long time here, ten years, getting around
to this elegy for Creecy. Elegy for Creecy! I hear him yell.
He loved to yell. Eulogy, elegy. I know what
those preachy words mean—but for,
that’s the one I don’t know.
His tenderness, brilliance, inventive genius.
The wholehearted making. Herb was a huge hoot.
I have an actual brother named Herb, 80.
Creecy was a soul brother. How old was he when he died?
Here is something he would enjoy me putting in his elegy:
I am standing at my bookcase, first thing in my day,
taking the blood-thinner pills, naked at the low bookcase,
when I realize that I have been spraying a line of books.
Peeing unbeknownst. Which books? my scholar-self asks.
I’ll tell you which. I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On,
A Samuel Beckett Reader. Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions.
Swedenborg’s Dream Diary. Carl Jung’s Letters, 1906–1950.
I paper-towel them dry. No harm done, and my interest
in each is rekindled. I guess I am a scholar.
But a really bad one, flighty, no stamina.
Creecy would never open any of these books.
I would so love to see him walking in,
with his great love for being alive walking in,
or walking a night street. Where are you going?
I have no idea. Forward. Forward!
For several years, he painted only fighter planes landing
on aircraft carriers, from below. No reason, just
what he was doing, in his wholly total, unintellectual way.
I am so afraid of my upcoming death. So close.
But the death-fear never came up at that kitchen table,
or with him lying there hands crossed over his chest.
Maybe I’ll call Lee and ask for more details about how
those last days went. I need to write out my own death details.
Meaning how and where to lug the guts,
as Hamlet says of Polonius, having just killed
the poor sweet cliché-man.
I keep putting that off,
the calling of the death meeting with my two sons,
telling them how to take me to be cremated.
How to wash the body, what I would like
to wear in the fire.
How I want things divided up. Who cares?
However you want, no fighting.
But how to dispose of this is more delicate.
