Thanks very much for coming.
This is the last poem, Winter Drought.
There was a drought in Princeton,
in New Jersey, where I lived during the winter last year.
A drought in the wintertime dries the land
every bit as much as one in the summer.
Winter drought for PK, 1957 to 1977.
First you cut your wrists and throat.
Then after they had sewn you up, after three months of hospitals
and talk, after those who loved you cried themselves out
and their faces changed to sculptures of mistrust
in the early light in the breakfast
nook as you told them each day point blank
how you felt about this life.
After they could no longer answer or look up and coffee
steam between wove a curtain of mist,
you stole your father's car and drove it
to the bridge across the Bay near Jamestown
where the police found it three days before they found
your body, bloated and frozen.
How could anyone so young want to die so much?
We asked, thinking loneliness tightens its death grip
gradually with age.
And we felt much older and lonelier,
ourselves, for a few days before this terrible image
you made of yourself began to fade and leave
even your closest friends content enough
in that vast part of life where your absence was not
noticed because you had never been admitted.
Such were the limits of intimacy you railed against,
fueled by too much whiskey.
One evening after a reading in a crummy Cambridge
bar to an uncomfortable group of 10, you stood at those fences
and screamed and we heard you and could do nothing.
Now it has been years, though even then
you were nearly nothing to me, a friend of a friend, a pushy
kid who loved poetry, one more young man alone
in his distress.
Last week when I went out to where I sometimes
walk across a field of chopped stalks,
yellowed and dried by months of snowless winter,
you rose suddenly from the undercurrents of memory dredged
in a steel net and I was there where I never
was amidst boat noise and ocean stink, your corpse twisting
as if hurt as the net broke the surface, then riding toward me
motionless, pale blue against the water's black.
And I think I've seen you every day since like this sometimes
or the few times we met or the moment you
balanced on the iced iron railing and jumped.
Maybe your suicide was the death you were born with
and you suffered no more or less than the rest of us,
but such rage for pain must give an immaculate clarity
to things, like the cold sunlight that shows
this field for what it is.
Dust and splintered stalks about to become dust,
shining nonetheless.
[APPLAUSE]