The Dark One

by Brett Rutherford

In memory of Scott Forsgren

We laughed in the graveyard
I wrote into poems and he
traced out in pen-and-ink.
His fingers raked earth
in the lake-shore hillside
until a bone that might have been
Jeannette Culberton’s finger
came to light, his trophy.

He walked one summer night
across the college campus
not knowing anyone, migraine
vision colliding with my identical
pain and misery. Two weeks
he stayed; like brothers we shared
a chaste bond, not to be broken.
I could not go home to parents;
something had riven him likewise
from home and family. Wagner
and Schubert, Mahler and Bach
bonded us. Moonlight and lake
and the transcendent stars
were our true homeland.
Some friendships
are instant, and last forever.

I moved to New York. I heard
he was swept away by religion,
at least for a while, and then
I heard no more of him.

Decades later, at a college reunion
for those of the Woodstock years
I heard it said casually
that he had drowned himself,
rock-weighted, self-hurled
from the top of a bridge.

In mind’s eye I saw
his weighted jacket,
the too-deep water,
the ignominy of a found body,
the pointless inquest,
the baffled, pained, guilty faces
of the left-behind.

I left the reception,
closed tight the door
of the cinder-block dorm
and wept uncontrollably.
That half-an-hour’s grief
should be enough for anyone,
but it did not abate.

What was the use of his death
except to those who stand and weep —
who must, in one life,
fill, and refill the cup of grief,
so early, and so many times?

What would I not have given to save him?
Why is self-murder a crime against the living?

If only magic could bring him back,
I would sit with ring and book
until the world collapsed
into its core of iron,
until the loam of the soil parted
and his dark laughter exploded
from his unremembered grave!

If only souls were immortal!
(The heart breaks, wishing it were so,
hoping to force from nature
what it cannot give).

If my hand raked soil
to touch the tip
of his dead fingers,
it would be our first
and only caress.