14 Suicide poems

for Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959 Lately, I've become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelopes me Each time I go out to walk the dog. Or the broad edged silly music the wind Makes when I run for a bus... Things have come to that. And now, each night I count the stars, And each night I get the same number. And when they will not come to be counted, I count the holes they leave. Nobody sings anymore. And then last night, I tiptoed up To my daughter's room and heard her Talking to someone, and when I opened The door, there was no one there... Only she on her knees, peeking into Her own clasped hands.

She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact: there’s only so much you can do with friction and an intentional hand before the hand burns. The sound that scissors make in a child’s hand while crunching construction paper aches when she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style, that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk. Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that. We come down from bunk beds. We come down from the funky reds and yellows of the spring’s summer tanager gone in fall. We fail to see the most vivid birds high in the trees on the other side of leaves. Where did those sad seeds come from or how take root? Her departure spun out of some samara down into a maple shadow that shadows well into night’s sweet syrup. O host, we don’t know the words for this country, and this country pretends we have no knife, no guns in the bedroom, no large car for escaping or crashing over hard hillsides or into houses. We stuff our faces, blank as pills, with pills. No one wants to open that book, but it’s a book.

(1970-2001) After the bullet discharges through the tunnel of his mouth, after it shatters the Oklahoma evening, rips through ragweed & across many rivers, my apartment in Pittsburgh, the metal clips my arm, slams into a plaster wall, & the silence is his body slackening & the black fact of the gun underwater. I compress my wound as his ghost kneels beside his body, the bathtub, & as his ghost draws the shower curtain back, I look away. No, I don’t want to know his secrets, why surer hands will tag, bag as evidence. He is a poet. He makes the difficult question of speaking a matter of remembering how he shouted the poems he loved. His outbursts were pure country. Yes, rumors circulated, how vets suffer medication, what he saw as a S.E.A.L., how weird, & no one could stand the belabored way he read aloud, & I said all the above & more, & to his face when no one was around when he finally caught on, I asked him, ‘Why are you quieter? I’ve noticed, & it scares me.’ * Even now I’m busy with details, the dirty work of gathering. Here’s rosemary & some pansies, that’s for thoughts rambled to me one Fall afternoon, Cathedral of Learning, how Komunyakaa showed him a way to anchor a moment between stillness & approach turning toward tall grass or a woman’s wet hair to braid, or how it could lock arms with an enemy, lose to an overwhelming grasp, or listen to the dying echo of paradise birds singing so much gibberish, as if a whole life could be reduced to one image dangling from a fist & engraved with a number, as if a poem wants only to be identified upon delivery, which was why Daniel read Blake, Calvino & Crane for fire & crystal. Why he shut himself up with Bishop. Why Stern’s huge breath, why Oppen, Tu Fu & Paz. Lewis & Vollmer mattered for their generosities, lines layered like the earth in his face, the reds & browns of his voice deepening to what he pursued, half-formed in haze & burrowing underneath to avoid tripwire, & Daniel yelling as he plunged after its gray, disappearing shape. * I listen to his ghost pace the hallway as if barefoot across dirt, fronds like unfurled scrolls, rustle. Root scent & rainfall stain his cheeks with welcome, risk. He has walked far to finish this conversation between us. He brushes against the wood, taps the doorknob trying to explain the jagged web of cracks in my wall, hot metal at the center like a labyrinth chamber or the slick tip of a widow hunched over & spinning a bundle or the pure ore from a journey toward sublimation, a soul’s treasure, or the soul, itself, lodged in a network & inconsolable because wings never guaranteed perfect pitch. * Daniel, the scar on my arm fades as I read your poems again, & the maps you drew time spackles over for a move out west. The twenty that someone taped to my office desk for flowers remains unspent, a bookmarker for a Ramses biography. I tried.   I couldn’t find your permanent address. Daniel, the news today proclaims disaster, code orange to survive for tomorrow’s headline that you were right could, at any moment, slip under a thicket, emerge skittish beside a pile of leaves, its long gray nose & black eyes focused on your movements. How you wrote it down, my friend, held it in the starless night & gave it pink fingers with which to scratch back.

It’s not just this.Every written word is a suicide note. And a love letter, too. There may be no one to talk to who would get it, but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you’ve left the room, or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star, will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen claimed he was born on Sirius. You remember him: the genius who said the crashing of planes into the World Trade Center was the greatest concert ever held, although he later conceded the audience had not been given the option to not attend and that somewhat diminished its perfection. I heard Stockhausen interviewed at Davies Symphony Hall before the orchestra played one of   his works that sounded to me like the voices of   the parents in A Charlie Brown Christmas if they’d been arguing about real estate. No, I was not impressed by Karlheinz. His daughter Christel was a flautist in the orchestra, and she joined him for the interview and said her father would take her and her brother out on the lawn of their summer house outside Cologne (this was years before he was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) and teach them to read each constellation as notes on a stave and to sing the words of their favorite nursery rhymes to the stars’ melody: “The dog ran away in the snow” and “Go get the sleigh in the cellar.” It was a game but it was hard: work and play at once. Their father explained to them, “God does not write catchy tunes.” You could tell she meant it to be a charming story, but the audience sat in silence. Suffer the little children.