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| Road and deed His index finger followed the numbers on the calendar. A soft shuffling from day to day: some so mild, others the turning of a month; his mouth’s speechlessness, his plodding, falling away from the last page, reaching this point of no return to the world of work and life, smiling, laughing nevertheless; it was a finished script. And so his finger froze as he took the final pills, put his mane in the sand, and left us more than a life. Claus, who suffered from Alzheimer's, died by euthanasia at a hospital in Antwerp on 19 March, 2008. |
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| Road and Deed 19/22 March 2008 ~ Hugo Claus By Joop Bersee - two poems, four drawings. |
| 22 March should be 29 March!
Again for Hugo Claus I had it all wrong: your funeral, or should I say your liberation through an ocean of flames, is tomorrow, Saturday 29 March. It was not last week the 22nd. They keep you cool, stored like a sandstone monument without its fingers, and no real brain to dream from morning to morning after. As I write this you are still amongst us, the flesh you waived, the world you ate, licking your lips and moaning when you wiped your mouth clean, it was so good. You left us behind where we do and don’t, sober or stoned by religions and gods in the heads of Man, not yours. Well, we will keep on murdering, that is a promise. What you left behind, the misery, will not change. There is the dance around the trees of water and blood, saliva on the tongues of popes, pulpits, the dragon’s flames, the silent mirror of the lake of our eyes, waving, calling us to take a peek, a sneer, a bow, and I hope you like it there. You might wonder, where o where? We are wondering, where o where? |
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