Vivian says I have to blog, so all right already. I have not memorized Plath or Milton; in fact I had forgotten about them, having fallen off the improve-my-gray-matter track of late. What happened was that my van burst into flames, and Jim dragged me out and I survived, but I was not particularly grateful. People think you are a soresport if you make this kind of remark, and by way of reply I'll just post Tony Hoagland's poem.



Suicide Song



But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself

Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge



At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea

Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope



But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way

And I am too knowledgable now to hurt people imprecisely



No longer do I live by the law of me

No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness



And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude

for sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated



Pickles they place at the edge of your plate

Killing yourself is wasteful like spilling oil



At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given

And anyway, who has clothes nice enough



To be caught dead in? You stay alive you stupid asshole

Because you haven't been excused



You haven't finished though it takes a stubborn appetite

To chew this food



It is a stone it is an inconvenience it is an innocence

And I turn against it like a record



Turns against the needle

That makes it play.





Poet Hayden Carruth wrote an essay about his suicide attempt--I think he later renounced the piece--in which he speaks of being granted time out of time by his survival (and I was never sure of what he meant by this.) However, I noticed that I was not possessed of a light-heartedness by my survival, the cathartic voltage of the saved. So there must be something wrong with me, I guess, though the value-assessment of life does change (and even our culture's insistence that you make an appropriate assessment) when you're one of the afflicted. You're half let off the hook, but only half--you still have to be a trouper.



And being a trouper I actually find more fun. Things keep happening. We rode our kayaks in the bay the other day and it was all bash bash bash saltwater in the face, our dinky bay more rough than I have ever seen and I am glad to have been so roughly handled by it. Too small to ever disappear like a speck, though last year a young man did--his canoe found but never him.



But I also was a party to the poem's ingrateful oil spill, as a full tank from my VW van leaked out and burned. Closed traffic on the main drag. In this way it was like a parade, a holiday.