"A Note for a Rainy Tuesday" (by Laura Orem)

Like all of you, I have been pondering the apparent suicide of the poet Deborah Digges. I didn't know her. But I have lost someone I loved very much, also a poet, to suicide, so the news this week of her death has stirred up some things for me that I realize I'm going to have to deal with - which means, of course, write about.

But not now, not today. Instead, I would like to share with you this poem by William Meredith, on the suicide of his friend John Berryman. I hope those of you who knew and loved Deborah Digges can take some comfort in it.

In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs

Friends making off ahead of time

on their own, I call that willful, John,

but that’s not judgment, only argument

such as we’ve had before.

I watch a shaky man climb

a cast-iron railing in my head, on

a Mississippi bluff, though I had meant

to dissuade him. I call out, and he doesn’t hear.

 

‘Fantastic! Fantastic! Thank thee, dear Lord’

is what you said we were to write on your stone,

but you go down without so much as a note.

Did you wave jauntily, like a German ace

in a silent film, as the paper said?

We have to understand how you got

from here to there, a hundred feet straight down.

Though you had told us and told us,

and how it would be underground

and how it would be for us left here,

who could have plotted that swift chute

from the late height of your prizes?

For all your indignation, your voice

was part howl only, part of it was caress.

Adorable was a word you threw around,

fastidious John of the gross disguises,

and despair was another: ‘this work of almost despair.’

 

Morale is what I think about all the time

now, what hopeful men and women can say and do.

But having to speak for you, I can’t

lie. ‘Let his giant faults appear, as sent

together with his virtues down,’ the song says.

It says suicide is a crime

and that wives and children deserve better than this.

None of us deserved, of course, you.

 

Do we wave back now, or what do we do?

You were never reluctant to instruct.

I do what’s in character, I look for things

to praise on the river banks and I praise them.

We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,

but this book is full of marvelous songs.

Don’t let us contract your dread recidivism

and start falling from our own iron railings.

Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.    

from Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems , Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Comments

[Grace Cavalieri]

Marvelous.

[Stacey]

This is just perfect Laura. It says so much. Thank you for knowing and posting this poem.

[Maria van Beuren]

Yes, a perfect choice, Laura.

[DL]

I will look forward to your musings on the suicide of poets. I wonder why so many have taken their own lives in the last two years. Sarah Hannah was barely 40 when she leaped off the roof of a building; a superb posthumous poem of hers was selected for BAP 2009. And last summer my old friend Tom Disch shot himself to death on the 4th of July. What terrible suffering went into these deaths. And how cruel for the survivors.

[Ernie Wormwood]

I agree, beautiful. I miss William Meredith, he was so kind to me at St. Mary's College. Thank you, Laura.