C. S. Lewis
None of the myths
held water anymore,
but he remade them into children’s stories.
And what he wrote for grownups turned harder,
as he grew lonelier, to tell from children’s stories.
If science wouldn’t back him, then it too
he’d treat as myth, and visit Mars and Venus,
endowing them with stories of the fall
and redemption tailored to their populations.
Merely a Christian,
he was more and less--
dogmatic at a student’s apostasy,
indulgent when a colleague betrayed a trust.
If Tolkien made a greater world than his,
and if he stole from Tolkien, in flattery,
still he was always bent to educate.
And in his best books gave us real people
wrestling with demons that were not fantasy.
As always the
biographers are wrong
and cannot help it. The life is on the page.
But there’s no brother crawling into Ulster
as if it were a bottle, no mother/wife,
dangling a cigarette, making him walk the dog,
no dying woman with obstreperous sons,
imposing on the geniality
that he’d call charity, which was just goodness.
The life is in the
books, and is not there,
thank God. Instead we have the clientele
of Hell, the populace of Purgatory, Heaven
as something like but better than the earth,
renewed in novel tellings, finding each time
the world inside the wardrobe, and the world,
banal and lovely as snow passing street lamps,
waiting for our return to it with love.
He died believing
that the lion and lamb
would turn perfect in the reinstated Eden,
as if the real purpose of the former’s claws
was to comb gently through the latter’s fleece.
Still hoping to meet Adam in Paradise,
he died with a contraption hooked to his body,
without complaining, only to sigh when Death,
like a student, appeared at the door to interrupt him.
First published
in Image, Spring/Summer 2004
