For The Suicides

FOR THE SUICIDES There are fields where men go like elephants like lemmings and they bring kitchen knives automobile exhausts a jar of barbiturates and shotguns. And the strawberry fields where I played with you are invisibly filled with souls and now that I have told you you feel that strawberries are ugly and you eat them no more. There are trilliums growing secretly between the trees and they are tiny crosses buried in the humus-covered soil and you pick them no more. There are fences leaning against the honeyed wind and insects have engraved on them forgotten dates and names and you cross them no more.

When you are not there with me I am there alone for I know them. I carry on my body the bruises and lice that they once carried. I count the soft hairs on my ragged brow just as they had. There are no poets in this field only husbands and fathers and mistaken lovers. My kerosened body will blaze from an empty-souled plane and rather than fall I will drift like a soft-spoken meteor and tomorrow when you walk alone through the bleeding strawberries you shall see my crater and you will forget the meaning of the fence and the trilliums.