The Other Side
The news these days, full of celebrity
suicides, puts me in mind of the view
from my long-ago ninth floor window
where a colony of water towers gathered
atop several blocks of apartment buildings
that sloped downhill toward 96th Street.
An agitated depression owned me then.
I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t wake up.
Couldn’t move. Couldn’t sit still.
What I could do was smoke. The ectoplasmic
dawn would mingle with my tobacco fumes
and the occasional plume of blues
from an alto sax on nights when my
off-again-on-again boyfriend was off-again,
or when the tribe of friends’ paisley swirl
of psychedelic ecstasies had formed
and reformed without me. Then
the saxophonist became so lucid
and lonesome, the wafting mists would incline
the Tin Woodsman hats of the towers
toward me and invite me to their
fellowship that spanned the plane of roofs.
Like the child at her nursery school concert
who, seeing Mom in the audience, walks off
the front of the stage, I had no thoughts
of EMT’s sweeping any splat of my blood
and bones from the canyon of 99th Street.
Neither despair of unwashed dishes nor
gross-out of burgeoning ashtrays moved me.
If any anguished outpouring of internet
empathy had existed then to prompt me
with suicide prevention numbers, it would
have meant nothing. If I could have called,
I could have made the leap
of faith that would have united me
with my new friends on the other side.
Interior with Washer and Dryer
Maybe our own parents will eat us
eventually – they may have eaten us
already. . . .
– Richard Howard
Not the swirl of Provençal/bandana/blue-and-white-toile prints
sloshing among sheets and pillowcases in the peristaltic
action of the washer,
Not Baba Yaga’s kerchief. Not Hänsel’s Tyrolean suspenders
or Solveig’s apron,
Not the youthful hero (who, I always forget, is invariably a boy)