Post 3 Kaylyn Torkelson

Elegy for a Suicide

John Poch

 

She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact:

there’s only so much you can do with friction

and an intentional hand before the hand burns.

The sound that scissors make in a child’s hand

while crunching construction paper aches when

she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style,

that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk.

Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that.

We come down from bunk beds. We come down from

the funky reds and yellows of the spring’s summer tanager

gone in fall. We fail to see the most vivid birds

high in the trees on the other side of leaves.

 

Where did those sad seeds come from or how take root?

Her departure spun out of some samara down into a maple

shadow that shadows well into night’s sweet syrup.

O host, we don’t know the words for this country,

and this country pretends we have no knife,

no guns in the bedroom, no large car for escaping

or crashing over hard hillsides or into houses.

We stuff our faces, blank as pills, with pills.

No one wants to open that book, but it’s a book.

 

“Elegy for a Suicide” is very heavy on the lament, and doesn’t seem to focus on the praise for the idealized dead so much. The speaker uses very dark imagery in the first half of the first stanza as a way to express grief; he uses the phrase “there’s only so much you can do with friction and an intentional hand before the hand burns” in the effort to show sadness at the loss of the subject of the poem. The speaker also goes through several descriptions of items or actions that could be related to suicide: fire, scissors, and drowning. The praise section of the poem, although not as thorough as the lament section, does show a shift in the attitude of imagery. While the previous section of the poem was darker, showing the “black below that,” the next section uses brighter colours such as “funky reds and yellows” as well as discussing brighter seasons such as spring and summer. The consolation seems to be the way the speaker describes her departure as sweet, using the words “samara” (a type of fruit) and “sweet syrup.” The latter portion of the poem expresses a quiet outrage at the idea that people pretend problems don’t exist; we choose not to see the knives and the guns because we can’t bear the reality they represent. The last line of the poem stands out to me as the most indicative of its purpose. “No one wants to open that book, but it’s a book.” No one wants to discuss suicide or think about it, but it’s still there, even though people refuse to focus on it. The poet is commenting on loss- especially that through suicide- and showing how unnecessary it truly is.

 

Poch, John. "Elegy for a Suicide." Poery Foundation. 1 Oct. 2012. Web. 22 Sept. 2014. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/244584>.