P. K. (1957–1977)
First you cut your wrists and throat
then after they had sewn you up,
after three months of hospitals and talk,
after those who loved you cried themselves out
and their faces changed to sculptures of mistrust
in the early light, in the breakfast nook,
as you told them each day point-blank
how you felt about this life,
after they could no longer answer or look up,
you stole your father’s car and drove it
to the bridge across the bay near Jamestown
where the police found it three days before
they found your body, bloated and frozen.
How could anyone so young want to die
so much? we asked-as if loneliness
tightened its death-grip gradually with age.
But we felt much older and lonelier ourselves
for a few days, until your terrible final image
began to fade and even your close friends
became again content enough
in that vast part of life
with families and earthly concerns
where your absence had never been noticed.
Such were the limits of friendship
you railed against, cursing its “ersatz intimacy”
one evening after a reading: in a crummy Cambridge bar,
with our uncomfortable group of ten
trapped in a half-moon booth,
you climbed onto the table and screamed
and we heard you and could do nothing
but pick up broken glass and take you home.
Now it has been years.
You were nearly nothing to me—a friend
of a friend, a pushy kid who loved poetry,
one more young man alone in his distress-
but last week when I went out to where I sometimes walk,
across a field of chopped stalks yellowed and dried
by months of snowless winter,
you rose abruptly from the undercurrents of memory
dredged in a steel net, and I was there
where I never was, amid boat noise
and ocean stink, your corpse twisting as if hurt
as the net broke the surface,
then riding toward me, motionless
pale blue against the water’s black.
And I’ve seen you here every day since,
as if I were walking the beach
the moment you balance on the iced, iron railing
and jump. Does such rage for pain
give immaculate clarity to things?
Like winter sunlight day after day
showing this field for what it is:
dust and splintered
stalks about to become dust?
Tell me what you want.
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