Poem for a Suicide
The yellow flowers on the grave
make an arch, they lie
on a black stone that lies on the ground
like a black door that will always
remain closed down into the earth,
into it is etched the name
of a great poet who believed
he had nothing more to say,
he threw himself into literal water
and everyone has done their mourning
and been mourned over, and we all
went on with our shopping,
I stare at this photograph of that grave
and think you died like him,
like all the others,
and the yellow flowers
seem angry, they seem to want to refuse
to be placed anywhere but in a vase
next to the living, someday
all of us will have our names
etched where we cannot read them,
she who sealed her envelopes
full of poems about doubt with flowers
called it her “granite lip,” I want mine
to say Lucky Life, and what would
a perfect elegy do? place the flowers
back in the ground? take me
where I can watch him sit eternally
dreaming over his typewriter?
then, at last, will I finally unlearn
everything? and I admit that yes,
while I could never leave
everyone, here at last
I understand these yellow flowers,
the names, the black door
he held open
and you walked through.
-Matthew Zapruder
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of editor of the poetry column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the editor of Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Photo by B.A. Van Sise
The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Two): Matthew Zapruder
Matthew Zapruder’s intricate and absorbing “Poem for a Suicide” dramatizes an ever-present paradox: that language is part of art’s saving grace but also forms grief’s alphabet. Helped by Zapruder’s brief comment on the poem at Poets.Org, I know that it begins ekphrastically, prompted by a picture of the great poet Paul Celan’s grave and the contrast of sun-colored flowers that “lie” over black stone. “The ‘you’ addressed,” Zapruder says, “is not one person, but several people. I want to understand them, and I want to hold onto them, but have no choice but to let them go.”
I think the phrase “have no choice” is of signal import; suicides “choose” to end their own lives, but the essence of suicide is its beyondness from choice. Or, put another way, choice has removed itself. It could be said that Celan died not by his own hand but at the hands of a language so blackened and blasphemed that he could no longer write or live inside it.
Instinctively, we feel anger toward the suicide, who has rejected a state of being that we still inhabit, an anger that the poem displaces into the yellow flowers:
. . .and the yellow flowers
seem angry, they seem to want to refuse
to be placed anywhere but in a vase
next to the living . . .
The old punishment for suicide, burial at a crossroads, was a way of keeping the suicide in proximity to life and the travels and travails that comprise it. This poem is itself a kind of crossroads, with three poets intersecting in it, or four, if we count the speaker/poet. There is Emily Dickinson, whose tombstone was her “granite lip,” and who “sealed her envelopes / / full of poems about doubt with flowers. . .” and Gerald Stern, whose every poem celebrated the great good fortune of being alive, and whose “Lucky Life” Zapruder has requested (as he says in his comment) be read at his own funeral. Celebration and doubt speak to one another, and to death.
“Poems about doubt” is a definitive description of Dickinson’s work. Doubt, the fuel of her prodigious talent, never abandoned her. The indeterminate “you” in this poem is, I think, a wonderful engine of doubt, belying the “a” in its title. It is crucial to the poem’s desire to move outward from its catalyst without entering generality—that is, to keep things in the realm of the personal, where feeling resides.
The first “you” appears just after we leave the poet’s grave:
. . . everyone has done their mourning
and been mourned over, and we all
went on with our shopping . . .
This has the shock of truth, of humor—first-world people have one distraction: consumption. A damning notion. Yet what better to restrain death, at least mentally, than new supplies? This, an updated, sharpened version of Ezra Pound’s “But a tawdry cheapness / shall outlast our days,” might have ended discussion; but the “you” widens and continues it:
I stare at this photograph of that grave
and think you died like him,
like all the others. . .
The poem wonders about death and its articulation (“someday / all of us will have our names / etched where we cannot read them”). “. . .and what would / a perfect elegy do? place the flowers // back in the ground?” This literalism joins with the “literal” water of the poet’s death. Shouldn’t poetry, the strongest form of language, restore life, as we try to do in thinking and re-thinking a death? But poetry is here to show the gap between what is and what ought to be. It is the way of empathy:
. . .here at last
I understand these yellow flowers,
the names, the black door
he held open
and you walked through.
Suicides come in waves, the first enabling the rest. Perhaps the biggest paradox of self-slaughter is that it is the choice of no choice. The walking through leaves “the black door” open, leaves us standing in a draft from the beyond.
We don’t want the poem to end, but have no choice but to let it go.
-Angela Ball
Powerful poem, Matthew.
Posted by: Emily Fragos | June 13, 2023 at 05:11 PM