Three Poems on a Prison SuicideI.
You were not sentenced to die
hanged
by a thin shred of jailhouse bathrobe
from a louvered vent
high up enough that you had to climb.
You have to be really serious
about dying
to pull that off.
How exactly did you plan it
so that
the body’s emphatic resistance
to dying
was quiet enough?
Or was there just
so much noise
that no one heard
your dying gasps’ increment?
I thought I saw you
in the face of a petunia
in the flower bed outside my door
through my tears
this afternoon.
II.
napalm flechette phosphorous 2-4d free-
fire zone carpet bombing
There sounds a roar as of a hot wind
a cry of grief big as the universe
as of a mother for her newly dead
child, instead, the mother dead. Ed
says Isn’t it time to come home
from the war?
as though it were a thing in the past
only, not last
Friday night’s singular
melodic strain against the chord.
Some news is not reducible
to bit streams on a fiber optic cable.
It needs a vessel
capable of pain,
needs an archangel’s vision
and one small woman’s
fist-sized heart.
III.
Taken as a mass, they have no proper name,
LBJ’s—little brown jobs the birders say.
Ah, but hold just one
for a long moment in your sight
and note, as might a seeking mate,
near perfect symmetry of brown hooded head
barred black-brown-lightest grey wing
tweeded breast.
Desire will draw you back,
your will or no. |
