Her husband hung himself from a cherry tree in their front yard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She discovered him after working in their bookstore,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
where I had met her a year before at a book signing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She’d drawn a tantalizing poster with black ink,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
tacked it up all over town and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One person showed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She apologized repeatedly during three hours with nothing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She sneaked me wine, sipped a bit herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our eyes certainly met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She recommended a writer named Roberto Bola\u00f1o<\/p>\n\n\n\n
and I didn’t want to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the suicide, wildness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Driving drunk into ditches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rarely showering or changing clothes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Blackout flings with locals and tourists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She looked me up on the jag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Said she was out to seduce me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We went on a jag together,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
but never at her house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She told me about the hanging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He’d received a handwritten note of rejection from the New Yorker<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n about one of his poems on the subject of wind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An editor said he was close<\/em>, encouraged him to keep writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If he’d received a form letter, he’d still be alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wanted to see that tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See if she had it cut down, stumped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She couldn’t look at that tree every day or could she?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eat the cherries?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I never asked about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On one of her last visits to Newport,<\/p>\n\n\n\n madness was ebbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She said I’d helped her grieve,<\/p>\n\n\n\n something about safe hedonism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (There is such a thing.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n She went with me to the printer<\/p>\n\n\n\n to help load cartons containing<\/p>\n\n\n\n the first literary review in Newport High School history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The cover was a photograph of a man dressed like Ronald McDonald<\/p>\n\n\n\n who walked down Highway 101 in a parade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I ambushed him with my camera at street level,<\/p>\n\n\n\n capturing his zany face and salute right out of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When she saw the cover, she laughed,<\/p>\n\n\n\n suggested how to present the book to the review’s staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I instantly agreed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fifteen minutes later she walked out of McDonald’s<\/p>\n\n\n\n with 25 brown bags bearing the golden arches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We slipped a copy inside each bag,<\/p>\n\n\n\n along with a silver-wrapped Ding Dong,<\/p>\n\n\n\n the magisterial cake of starving poets,<\/p>\n\n\n\n I told them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I must have passed out a thousand that semester,<\/p>\n\n\n\n in the cruelest year of the Great Recession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Monday morning I made the presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wonder if any student remembers the happy bedlam of that moment,<\/p>\n\n\n\n the moment you held a book in your hands and your story was in there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Did it amount to anything shaping contours of their future?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Would it one day prevent hanging yourself in your front yard?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later she published a letter press edition of her husband’s poems about wind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She mailed me one of the 50 or so copies. I read it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It should have won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No one would have done something like that for me<\/p>\n\n\n\n had I killed myself or died in a traffic accident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have lived a life that does not warrant such an action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is still time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10036,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-poetry","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10037,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035\/revisions\/10037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}