James, Saramago, and Saint Praxed’s Bishop

“So it has come at last-the Distinguished Thing.” 
No one has ever said anything sillier than these,
Henry James’s latest words. “Distinguishing,” had
he said that, we’d have understood but shook our
head, of course. At the end Saramago, like James,
stopped speaking, letting perforce his smile do his
talking, this man of millions of words and more,
so many stories still to tell, surrounded now by his
family, living out his end-not in a hospital bed, as
Sena said all of us must do now-a-days, but more
like Browning’s bishop, who dare not stop talking,
pleading for his tomb, fearful for his ducats and the
fate of his jewels, greedy to the last with the sands
of existence sifting slowly through extended hands.