REVERSE SUICIDE
The guy Dad sold your car to
comes back to get his money,
leaves the car. With filthy rags
we rub it down until it doesn’t shine
and wipe your blood into
the seams of the seat.
Each snowflake stirs before
lifting into the sky as I
learn you won’t be dead.
The unsuffering ends
when the mess of your head
pulls together around
a bullet in your mouth.
You spit it into Dad’s gun
before arriving in the driveway
while the evening brightens
and we pour bag after bag
of leaves on the lawn,
waiting for them to leap
onto the bare branches.
originally appeared in Passages North
I asked the incredibly talented Matt Rasmussen for a poem
about sibling loss because it is an experience we share. What Matt does so
brilliantly in this poem is capture all the parts of such loss—the
bewilderment, the anger, the utterly mundane scenes that preceed an event that
changes everything for a family.
The poem starts with a title that is explanatory—it
describes exactly the fantasy that will follow, the reverse of the series of
actions that took place when the speaker’s brother shot himself.
The poem begins casually, as if the brothers were talking:
“The guy Dad sold your car to/comes back to get his money” and this doesn’t
become jarring for a few stanzas. And yet the nagging straightforwardness of
the financial transaction catches us, just a bit. The father and son, with the returned car, wipe it down “with
filthy rags” because the car is getting dirtier as time moves backwards, until
we come to the first really brutal stanza:
and wipe your blood into
the seams of the seat.
Of course, if events could move in reverse, the blood would
have to go back into the car before it could go back into the not-dead body of
the brother, and yet. The initial discomfort we feel at the financial
transaction of selling the car is heightened here by a sense that no brother—or
father—should be doing this job. Not ever. Rasmussen’s monosyllables work well here to heighten the
brute force of the action he describes.
The poem then shifts, turns toward beauty in the snow that
is not falling now but lifting:
Each snowflake stirs before
lifting into the sky as I
learn you won’t be dead.
Anyone who has suffered an unexpected tragedy recognizes
this moment, the moment when we learn of the loved one’s death and everything
changes and we have to “learn” the world anew. But in reverse, the moment is
still fraught. The speaker can’t quite unknow the loss; instead, he has to
learn a different truth, his brother “won’t be dead.” Which is not the same as
saying “you are alive.” We see this struggle to believe the fantasy the speaker
is creating in the next lines, which are angry and direct:
The unsuffering ends
when the mess of your head
pulls together around
a bullet in your mouth.
Here the speaker acknowledges both his own anger “mess of
your head” and the hopelessness of the fantasy. To wish his brother back means
to wish him into suffering again. So whose suffering will be relieved? Whose will carry
on?
The poem ends brilliantly, in the familiar, mundane world of
family tasks: two brothers working in the yard together. Those leaves could no more return to
the trees than a brother return to life. And while the speaker realizes this,
the image of the brothers in the yard increases the sense of loneliness and
loss. What we lose when we lose a sibling is the person who helps us remember
the moments, not only important ones, that construct our lives. We lose the person who we assumed would
be there through all the hard journeys. And in dying, the sibling has left the
hard things—parental suffering, aging, grief, loneliness—to us. And of course, we lose the joys we would have shared, moving through this gorgeous world together.
19 years ago today my sister Kate died from carbon monoxide
poisoning. Thank you, Matt, for this beautiful poem. It helps make a sad day a
little bit less so.
Matt’s first
book, Black Aperture, winner of the prestigious 2012 Walt Whitman Award from the American
Academy of Poets, will be published in May by Louisiana State University Press. For more about Matt or his book, go to
