WEBVTT

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Thanks very much for coming.

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This is the last
poem, Winter Drought.

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There was a drought
in Princeton,

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in New Jersey, where I lived
during the winter last year.

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A drought in the
wintertime dries the land

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every bit as much as
one in the summer.

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Winter drought for
PK, 1957 to 1977.

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First you cut your
wrists and throat.

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Then after they had sewn you up,
after three months of hospitals

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and talk, after those who
loved you cried themselves out

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and their faces changed
to sculptures of mistrust

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in the early light
in the breakfast

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nook as you told them
each day point blank

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how you felt about this life.

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After they could no longer
answer or look up and coffee

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steam between wove
a curtain of mist,

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you stole your father's
car and drove it

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to the bridge across
the Bay near Jamestown

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where the police found it
three days before they found

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your body, bloated and frozen.

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How could anyone so young
want to die so much?

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We asked, thinking loneliness
tightens its death grip

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gradually with age.

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And we felt much
older and lonelier,

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ourselves, for a few days
before this terrible image

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you made of yourself
began to fade and leave

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even your closest
friends content enough

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in that vast part of life
where your absence was not

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noticed because you had
never been admitted.

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Such were the limits of
intimacy you railed against,

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fueled by too much whiskey.

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One evening after a reading
in a crummy Cambridge

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bar to an uncomfortable group
of 10, you stood at those fences

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and screamed and we heard
you and could do nothing.

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Now it has been years,
though even then

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you were nearly nothing to me,
a friend of a friend, a pushy

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kid who loved poetry,
one more young man alone

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in his distress.

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Last week when I went
out to where I sometimes

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walk across a field
of chopped stalks,

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yellowed and dried by
months of snowless winter,

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you rose suddenly from the
undercurrents of memory dredged

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in a steel net and I
was there where I never

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was amidst boat noise and ocean
stink, your corpse twisting

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as if hurt as the net broke the
surface, then riding toward me

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motionless, pale blue
against the water's black.

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And I think I've seen you every
day since like this sometimes

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or the few times we
met or the moment you

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balanced on the iced
iron railing and jumped.

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Maybe your suicide was the
death you were born with

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and you suffered no more or
less than the rest of us,

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but such rage for pain must
give an immaculate clarity

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to things, like the
cold sunlight that shows

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this field for what it is.

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Dust and splintered stalks
about to become dust,

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shining nonetheless.

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[APPLAUSE]

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