People can’t say goodbye / any more. They say last hellos. In this poem the narrator says his last hellos to his father, who is dying from a brain tumor. Cecil (the father) seems wise and cantankerous, reflective yet humorous.
His son asks, "Sorry, Dad, but like / have you forgiven your enemies?" Cecil replies that he must have because he doesn’t think about them anymore. Later, near the end in the hospital, he tells his son, "You’re bustin to talk / but I’m too busy dyin." The son concludes, "Snobs mind us off religion / nowadays, if they can. / Fuck them. I wish you God." [76 lines]
Hearing loss? Yes, loss is what we hear / who are starting to go deaf. This humorous poem surveys the specific deficits and behaviors that people develop as they progressively lose their hearing. Eventually they reach the point of needing hearing aids and being "wired / back into a slightly thinned world / with a faint plastic undertone to it."
An especially disabling (and potentially humorous) aspect of hearing loss is the inability to decipher speech. The poem provides several examples of garbled interpretation. In the first stanza, "the sad surrealism of the deaf" becomes "dad's a real prism of the Left, " thereby giving a verbal and visual example of the meaning of the phrase. Another illustration: "Hearing Impairment" ends with the line "I'm sorry, sir. It's a red alert!" An urgent statement that earlier in the stanza the hearing-impaired narrator has understood to mean, "a warrior is a ready flirt." [50 lines]
The narrator was ridiculed during adolescence because he was fat and socially inept at school. He had one friend, Marion, "a slender girl who came up on holidays from the city / to my cousin's farm." He liked to show-off to others, but couldn't express his feelings, especially to Marion, who he only now realizes was "my first love." At the age of 19, during her nursing training, "she had a fatal accident / alone, at night, they said, with a lethal injection / and was spared from seeing what my school did to the world." [28 lines]
The poem's title refers to John Hunter Hospital, where Les Murray lay near death for three weeks as a result of a liver condition. He "turned yellow as the moon / and slid inside a CAT-scan wheel," then found himself emerging from a "time warp" of unconsciousness 20 days later. Murray reports that he is "the only poet whose liver / damage hadn't been self-inflicted."
He goes on to explain what had happened to make his liver rehearse "the private office of the grave." When he was over the crisis, he signed a "Dutch contract," presumably an advance directive of some sort. Surprisingly, surviving his bout of acute liver failure seemed to cure his other problem, "the Black Dog, depression." The poem ends with a paean of gratitude for "the project of seeing conscious life / rescued from death." [80 lines]
