"A Sideways Suicide" by Michael Burkard
A Sideways Suicide This evening when I go off with myself I go off with myself. This is a suicide, this going off, this is a sideways suicide, but I mean to give this to you. I needed rain, the way in which it would feed itself, so that when the rain came, as it did this afternoon, I knew I’d go off to you. When I committed suicide it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy by any means: everyone I didn’t know wanted to talk about it, but their manner of talking about it was manner, hovering like a plane that didn’t land, but kept believing in itself, as if it would. They also had a way of leaving me out, even as they talked they talked as if I had nothing to do with it, my own suicide, my fallen men and my fallen women who have wept now here in my body, in the very disparate areas of my body, for twelve years. I thought it appropriate they left me out, that they hovered over me, although it angered me at the same time. An author’s note would say something like this: “five minutes or so,” but I am not an author. I think authors are assholes. And that hesitation is a jealousy that is no better than feeling sorry, which is no better than the absence jealousy finally means. The author’s note says something like we’ll finally meet, in 1950 or in 1976, or for that matter that we won’t meet, like the rain today and this evening won’t meet me, as much as I would like it to. I don’t think the rain is worth coming back to, I don’t think suicide is worth coming back to, and this leads me to think that the body isn’t worth it either. This would mean that the mind is in an even worse place, falling back like a memory that has no possibility of being remembered. Or it means this: When I committed suicide you were startled; at the same time there was a warm place, a warm place entitled “departure,” the way an author, an asshole, would entitle it. And in this distance there is the same kind of memory as the memory I see that crosses your face, even from the easy loving that rain was, and will be —one evening I will submissively return to this departure, and I will walk in back of myself, like a shadow will walk, like a shadow now walks in back of myself. I will disconnect any old grief you feel, I will take it, I will take it off the wall, like you can take a telephone off the wall, then I will speak on that phone: authors are assholes, the rain that is lost is memory that is lost, like you are, and I’ll walk, I will walk in a very local direction, and I will revenge the change that memory brings, as it must bring change, as it changes. —Michael Burkard from Ruby for Grief (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981)
I used to use Michael Burkard’s “A Sideways Suicide” on exams in poetry courses. I liked the way it required students to let go of the literal and lean on other ways of knowing, of accessing feeling: music, movement, repetition. I think it’s another one of my answering machine poems; I know assorted lines and phrases have been part of my internal jukebox, a device with neither discernible controls nor logic nor yankable plug for almost twenty-five years. The first time I deployed it on an unsuspecting class it was probably 2004 or 2005, and this went on for ten years or so, until one particular group took it on themselves to inquire after my well-being the next week. I was, I assured them, just fine. (I am, I assure you, just fine.)
Still, I have been mesmerized by this poem for twenty-five years, so take from that what you will, I guess. I’ve always understood it as an assertion of selfhood, a kind of unbarbaric yawp. Where Whitman hollers his celebration of self from sea to shining sea, Burkard pulls an Irish goodbye and ambles off into the evening: I imagine him taking the alleyways because they are more interesting, taking a circuitous stroll on his way to “you.” Who is the you? It’s someone he loves, or loved; it’s someone he has some connection with, or had; it’s someone he wants to connect with now, but can’t. Why not? Who knows. Sometimes that’s just the way things go. We fall out or fall away; we absent ourselves out of stupidity or self-preservation; sometimes we simply die.
I think I have the text right, but I had to track this one down online and found it, egads, on a Livejournal. There was at least one typo I was sure of and a second I am pretty sure needed my correction (‘feel’ to ‘feed’ in line four). If anyone has Ruby for Grief to hand, I’d be pleased to be corrected as needed. I thought I still had a copy, but when the first line came back to me while I was drifting off to sleep and I went to the bookcase, I saw that it was missing and immediately remembered why: I lent it to my favourite student in 2017 or so. I think he may have been in that welfare-check section—I remember he took my intro course—but I’d given it to him to read later on, when he got into the MFA where Burkard was teaching.
This kid was an incredibly talented young writer; he’d never even read poetry, wasn’t even an English major, and he advanced a decade in about eighteen months of formal study. He’d also clearly never felt he had a home before he had poems. He reminded me, as our favourites always do, of me. I think he also made off with my copy of Heather McHugh’s Hinge & Sign, but when he came back to visit during his second semester he brought me Bruce Smith’s Devotions.
That was the last time I saw him. He died by suicide in the spring of his second year. Typing this now knocks the wind out of me. It’s something an author, an asshole, would say.
What does it for me in this poem is yet again a rupture, another em dash kicking off a shift in register. Where the repetition of syntax and phrases has been circuitous, meditative, playful to this point, there’s a rawness to the pledges that follow: “I will walk,” “I will disconnect”
any old grief you feel I will take it, I will take it off the wall
like you can take a telephone off the wall, then I will speak
There’s an urgent intensity here, one borne, I think, of disconnection: of being tired of whatever it is that keeps our speaker from connecting, from saying what he really feels. What he feels is that authors are assholes, and rain and memory are both ephemeral; what he feels most acutely is rendered sideways, in simile: “you” are ephemeral as well. There’s some raging against the dying of the light to close the poem out, but what I love here tonight is the vague specificity of our speaker’s destination:
I’ll walk,
I will walk in a very local direction, and I will revenge the change
You will revenge neither rain nor death, but there’s something very beautiful to me about imagining you can, and especially about the direction Burkard turns: not outward into that good night, but someplace smaller, simpler: right here. Stay here.
