"Poem for a Suicide" by Matthew Zapruder

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April 18, 2023 

Poem for a Suicide

Matthew Zapruder

The yellow flowers on the grave
make an arch, they lie 

on a black stone that lies on the ground
like a black door that will always

remain closed down into the earth,
into it is etched the name

of a great poet who believed
he had nothing more to say,

he threw himself into literal water
and everyone has done their mourning 

and been mourned over, and we all 
went on with our shopping, 

I stare at this photograph of that grave
and think you died like him, 

like all the others,
and the yellow flowers 

seem angry, they seem to want to refuse 
to be placed anywhere but in a vase 

next to the living, someday 
all of us will have our names 

etched where we cannot read them,
she who sealed her envelopes

full of poems about doubt with flowers 
called it her “granite lip,” I want mine 

to say Lucky Life, and what would 
a perfect elegy do? place the flowers 

back in the ground? take me 
where I can watch him sit eternally 

dreaming over his typewriter? 
then, at last, will I finally unlearn 

everything? and I admit that yes, 
while I could never leave 

everyone, here at last 
I understand these yellow flowers, 

the names, the black door 
he held open 

and you walked through.

Copyright © 2023 by Matthew Zapruder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The ‘great poet’ whose grave is mentioned in this poem is Paul Celan. He took his own life in Paris in 1970. Emily Dickinson, who referred to her own gravestone as her ‘granite lip,’ and Gerald Stern, whose ‘Lucky Life’ I would like read at my funeral, also appear. The ‘you’ addressed is not one person, but several people. I want to understand them, and want to hold onto them, but have no choice but to let them go.”
—Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), as well as two collections of prose, including Story of a Poem (Unnamed Press, 2023). The recipient of a William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, he is editor-at-large at Wave Books. Zapruder teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Father's Day

Father’s Day
(Copper Canyon Press, 2019)
 

 

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