Foraging the Heart
Writing the Big Sads
CW: Suicide
Since I started making time for poetry again with our bi-weekly workshop (ie - Covid forcing me to) a lot of secondary effects have shown-up. One of them is my renewed interest in sending work out for publication (and getting a lot more comfortable with high-percentage rejection rates). Another is looking at the various stories of my life and, not so much making sense out of them, but seeing them through the eyes of the newer older person I’m always becoming. Seeing them from this vantage point requires just looking at them at all, and sometimes I have been avoiding looking directly at those stories for a reason.
In the summer of 2001, my 21-year-old step-brother Rick killed himself with his gun while serving as an MP with the US Army. The details about what happened are fuzzy (or maybe not fully told to me as a 20-year-old at the time) but it’s my understanding that the Army was not kind to him. A few years ago I was talking to one of our other brothers about it and said something I thought was comforting, “At least there’s some dignity in being able to choose when you die” and my brother said, “Nah, that’s what you say about old, sick people.”
I catch myself being emotionally manipulative sometimes, being sad to elicit a response or something (I hopethink I am better than I was). But I am sometimes overly cautious about that when it comes to talking about the Big Sad Stuff in my life. Luckily I have good therapy, but because I want to withhold discussing the Big Sads so as not to commodify them for attention (or artificially “trauma bonding”), I end up not talking about them at all, despite thinking about them near-daily. In part, I know other people are accumulating their own Big Sads and I don’t want to bother them with mine.
Poetry, for me, can be a place for those Sads. Hopefully all the words I use are chosen with care, but, as I’ve said elsewhere, I want to be VERY EXTRA careful about how and when I talk about these things. I once wrote a poem about a different very horrible event and I read it only three times in public. Before I shared it, I asked the audience to please not talk to me about it after the show - which is maybe dumb, but I just don’t want to cash in on social/artistic capital because of someone I love. I am literally performing my trauma and that can get emotionally unsafe or murky for me.
Once asked if he has an exciting life to create content for his poems, Jack Gilbert said something like, “No, I live my life to live my life. I’m not going to farm my heart for poetry.” So maybe this is sustainable wild foraging the heart?
All of that to say, I wrote a draft of this poem in our Zoom workshop and now it’s published in the Fall 2023 Allium Journal from Columbia College. It’s about Rick’s funeral. I did let my family read it first before consenting to it being published - it’s not just my story to tell.
Taps
the song
had always been
a joke in cartoons
Taps would play when
Elmer Fudd shoots Daffy’s
whole face off or whatever
I had never seen an American flag
folded so tightly into a triangle
by Bugs-style white-gloved muscle-remembering hands
like the triangles we’d make
paper footballs out of at lunch
The guns the guns
shooting salute
I may have seen
on live TV for a Veteran’s Day thing
But here we are somehow
Elwood cemetery
white-gloved hands fold the flag
right angle
hand it to Marge
Hear the guns the guns the guns
the guns the guns the guns the guns
Hear the aunts wailing
Hear a kid with a trumpet
barely get through “Taps”
before collapsing into his
commanding officer’s arms
weeping for my brother whom
he did not know
he didn’t know Rick at all
the CO held him
probably breaking protocol
holding him until
it was done.