Elegy for a Suicide

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.