University of Northern Iowa

Off-SeasonAuthor(s): Charles WrightSource: The North American Review, Vol. 250, No. 5/6 (Nov., 1965), p. 4Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25116246 .

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^UNLO?DINcX V ZONE J?

ANGELS AT BAY

Continence is uncomfortable, breeds self abuse, and fathers only anxieties.

Concupisence flourishes in our sex-oriented culture. But contraception is taught in neither home, school

nor church.

Conception is certain. Abortion is illegal. There is no escape. Man is doomed to be born. So predictions are that men will be standing on each

other before today's kindergartners occupy the beds

already reserved for them in day-after-tomorrow's nursing homes for senile terminal cases.

Not only doomed to birth, man is doomed to live and live and live until retirement savings are gone, his pen sion devoured, his property consumed by the cost of

wonder drugs, and his progeny welded to soul-gnawing guilt because to die has become economically unsound and intellectually unacceptable.

Quoting government statistics, The World Almanac for 1965 prints that average life expectancy in the

United States zoomed from 47.3 years in 1900 to 70

years in 1962. The Statistical Abstract of the U.S. re

veals that $110,000,000.00 was spent on private nurs

ing home care in 1950 while the cost has risen to $400, 000,000.00 by 1963. These figures carefully exclude

hospital care, physicians' services, dental care, drugs and sundries, eyeglasses, costs paid by health insurance

plans, and practically everything else except bed and bored. Also excluded are the figures for veterans' hos

pitals, prisons, mental institutions, tubercular hospitals and so forth.

This $400,000,000.00 is merely the bill for board and room for the thousands of comparatively rich sen ior citizens who can afford private care away from the homes of relatives. A few, mostly church support ed, are decent, respectable hotels operated for reasons other than economic, but most of these cubicles are sub-standard rabbit warrens where reluctant life is

urged, propped, forced, pushed, pulled or cajoled to continue.

Flesh withers. Bone crumbles.

Minds collapse. Spirit flees. The will to live vanishes but life must go on. All passions spent, unable to recognize kith or kin,

friend or foe, often insulated against awesome physical agony by incredibly expensive wonder drugs, merciful death is withheld by ignorance, economics and hypoc risy.

Cheerful, beloved, intelligent and loving relatives are shoved out of sight, out of hearts, and out of minds to become ghastly caricatures of the men and women they once were.

Must sentimentality, fear, and greed collude in un

holy siege to keep bands of angels at bay? Must all men anticipate the long, black twilight of

drug-propped senility? Forced to be born and death withheld, has man so

warped his concept that there is indeed no exit? All but a few seem to have forgotten that life's hand

maiden is death. PKF

SHELLEY

For days the water worked him over, Drilled toward his bones, hammered his skin Until it grew so slack, so thin, It parted to let the light inside

And he became his name forever, The age's anchor, love's high tide.

OFF-SEASON

This one island Has slipped Summer's harness. Its

Towns stand Dull in their fields Like patient Oxen, white-kneed And sad, with No one to please. The beaches, the flat-faced Hotels all Are deserted, their

Shopfronts are shuttered. The Townsfolk talk

Only in off

Tones, or not

At all. Over Their shoulders they Hear the drop Of chains, The dark winds start Behind the Urals.

Charles Wright

4 The North American Review

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