The Hanging
Her husband hung himself from a cherry tree in their front yard.
She discovered him after working in their bookstore,
where I had met her a year before at a book signing.
She’d drawn a tantalizing poster with black ink,
tacked it up all over town and beyond.
One person showed.
She apologized repeatedly during three hours with nothing to do.
She sneaked me wine, sipped a bit herself.
Our eyes certainly met.
She recommended a writer named Roberto Bolaño
and I didn’t want to leave.
After the suicide, wildness.
Driving drunk into ditches.
Rarely showering or changing clothes.
Blackout flings with locals and tourists.
She looked me up on the jag.
Said she was out to seduce me.
We went on a jag together,
but never at her house.
She told me about the hanging.
He’d received a handwritten note of rejection from the New Yorker
about one of his poems on the subject of wind.
An editor said he was close, encouraged him to keep writing.
If he’d received a form letter, he’d still be alive.
I wanted to see that tree.
See if she had it cut down, stumped.
She couldn’t look at that tree every day or could she?
Eat the cherries?
I never asked about it.
On one of her last visits to Newport,
madness was ebbing.
She said I’d helped her grieve,
something about safe hedonism.
(There is such a thing.)
She went with me to the printer
to help load cartons containing
the first literary review in Newport High School history.
The cover was a photograph of a man dressed like Ronald McDonald
who walked down Highway 101 in a parade.
I ambushed him with my camera at street level,
capturing his zany face and salute right out of the Third Reich.
When she saw the cover, she laughed,
suggested how to present the book to the review’s staff.
I instantly agreed.
Fifteen minutes later she walked out of McDonald’s
with 25 brown bags bearing the golden arches.
We slipped a copy inside each bag,
along with a silver-wrapped Ding Dong,
the magisterial cake of starving poets,
I told them.
I must have passed out a thousand that semester,
in the cruelest year of the Great Recession.
On Monday morning I made the presentation.
I wonder if any student remembers the happy bedlam of that moment,
the moment you held a book in your hands and your story was in there.
Did it amount to anything shaping contours of their future?
Would it one day prevent hanging yourself in your front yard?
Later she published a letter press edition of her husband’s poems about wind.
She mailed me one of the 50 or so copies. I read it.
It should have won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
No one would have done something like that for me
had I killed myself or died in a traffic accident.
I have lived a life that does not warrant such an action.
There is still time.