14 Suicide poems

The newspaper caption read: “Two officers talk to a young man, name withheld, as he stands on a bridge above the Merrimack River, distraught over learning that his mother is terminally ill.” When I first saw you I could glance up from your image in the paper and out her kitchen doorway watch my mother trim her artemisia, scraps of silver trailing her green wheelbarrow. And I imagined yes, if mine were dying, I would be on the abutment too, about to release the cable ignoring those attempting rescue

My dear, I wonder if before the end You ever thought about a children’s game— I’m sure you must have played it too—in which You ran along a narrow garden wall Pretending it to be a mountain ledge So steep a snowy darkness fell away On either side to deeps invisible; And when you felt your balance being lost You jumped because you feared to fall, and thought For only an instant: That was when I died. That was a life ago. And now you’ve gone, Who would no longer play the grown-ups’ game Where, balanced on the ledge above the dark, You go on running and you don’t look down, Nor ever jump because you fear to fall.

The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss.

lives on an island of last-ditch attempts and ancient consolations after the shipwreck she swam ashore near naked hands scraped raw on coral bra and panties soaked through sand in her teeth lapped by aftermath lying exhausted slowly approaching the condition of music he loved her stubborn luster sure they argued sometimes the word "argue" from Latin meaning to make clear while she sat quietly in the wing chair her eyes closed police ransacked his desk the note turned up in his pocket with the letter for his sister a baseball ticket stub receipts for two "taco platters" he whose soul was bound up with mine and part of a bookmark six weeks later she looks great thin and translucent a statue of justice sans blindfold she wears beautiful blouses now peach, gold, seedling green her complexion has never been better lushness nips at the heels of destruction tonight's lurid sunset's a cocktail of too many boozes she'd like to switch it off via remote control but there's no antidote for celestial events a frantic bat takes a wrong turn from the attic veers into her living room, bounces off walls a sick flut-thud each time it hits the suicide's wife pulls out her roasting pan climbs the kitchen counter teeters and grabs for twenty minutes at last claps on the lid walks her prize outside releases the creature into the trees where the lawn peters out where the idea that at death something is liberated can flap blackly away.

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that I couldn’t today name the gods you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d roast in Hell poor suffering bastards like you, unable to bear the masks of their own faces. With words you sought to shape a world alternate to the one that dared inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you could not, could never fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you inherited. More than once you asked that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your death feel like failure to everybody who ever loved you as if our collective cpr stopped too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten. I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite your best efforts you are every second alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons. We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.

didn't thank didn't wave goodbye didn't flutter the air with kisses a mound of gifts unwrapped bed unmade no appetite always elsewhere though it was raining elsewhere though strangers peopled the streets though we at home slaved and baked and wept and hung ornaments and perfumed the dark did he marvel did he thank was he grateful        did he know was he human was he there always elsewhere: didn't thank didn't kiss toothbrush stiffened with unuse puppy whining in the hall car battery dead sweaters unraveled was that human? Went where?

Yes I put her away. But now life flares up As safe as China in a cup You hear the droppings of her heart. Leaves rustle on the windowpane. Three o’clock turns round again. The man in the moon grows full Of her death while earth awaits beneath To receive her ashes on the wind. Yes, earth owns the wind As I her life Whom I have never seen Nor been with Still within our hearts there lies this communion of all that dies we held in common because without it we become more common than the dust. 2. Clay cannot create her features nor mirror reveal her mouth Photograph not show her form full with self, so put away her picture from the shelf And turn instead to living woman on the couch, decked with flowers as if it were she laid out, and not Sylvia, in the woods. 3. Address to the Woman Tell her that may not rise again she sings still in our breath. Tell her that may not breathe again she moves yet beneath the moon. Tell her that may not weave again her hands are dawns within our eyes. Tell her that may not speak again Her words are warnings in the wood.

You don’t need a machine to do that. A plastic bag will do. But he built it, his tools cast about in the unit while he got up his nerve to use it. Nothing more was stored there. A poured cement floor, a triple-locked door after door after door down a corridor reeking with the odor of everything over. In heretofore phrases, he left a note outlining his Help! in argot so wrought it was hopeless to ferret out his intent, meant or not. A ball-peen hammer was all she had. The shards cut her. What else had he hid? At least, she cried, he’d thought ahead. He drove home instead.

Have I spent too much time worrying about the boys killing each other to pray for the ones who do it with their own hands? Is that not black on black violence? Is that not a mother who has to bury her boy? Is it not the same play? The same plot & characters? The curtain rises, then: a womb a boy a night emptied of music a trigger a finger a bullet then: lights. It always drives the crowd to their feet. An encore of boy after boy after sweet boy            — their endless, bloody bow. They throw dirt on the actors like roses until the boys are drowned by the earth & the audience doesn’t remember what they’re standing for.

We all think about suddenly disappearing. The train tracks lead there, into the woods. Even in the financial district: wooden doors in alleyways. First I want to put something small into your hand, a button or river stone or key I don’t know to what. I don’t have that house anymore across from the graveyard and its black angel. What counts as a proper goodbye? My last winter in Iowa there was always a ladybug or two in the kitchen for cheer even when it was ten below. We all feel suspended over a drop into nothingness. Once you get close enough, you see what one is stitching is a human heart. Another is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life. Whenever you put your feet on the floor in the morning, whatever the nightmare, it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion: the solidity of the boards, the steadiness coming into the legs. Where did we get the idea when we were kids to rub dirt into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania? Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.