BRUCE SMITH

"Beautiful Boy"

____________________

1

After the beautiful boy killed himself I killed myself

and lived in the trash vortex, the j’accuse of the US

with gear and the beclouded night kindness and a mind

like a mule deer in the poorest of zips. My affection

got only so close before I withdrew into self-protection,

my white tail an insolent so long. I lived by borrowing

the stillness and dominion and circumference and how dare I

be anything at all, mud under his boot sole, the roux

of the cookbooks he borrowed from the library,

and I returned and wanted stew and the simmering of him.

2

Where was the equipment for living? Where was the witness?

And where was the Very Rich Hours: the exchange of rings,

the gathering of flowers? Both beautiful and boy and April

gone the way of trumpeting May and ghost structures

of the Gothic, costly blue and gold depicting ...

Could you say beautiful and boy after the beautiful boy

killed himself? April felt like retrograde February,

impoverished color fields of angry, blowing on our hands

in the Middle Ages of Syracuse where we lived in a university

city, joining faith to magical thinking to tactics for fleeing.

3

After the beautiful boy killed himself was

became impossible to hold in one mind, my mind,

and I could not look directly at is, the wind

and the thinly branched sapling that is/was his height

and others wore shoes like his shoes, like

was legal and the swellings of April illegal

made up as it was [was] of gaps and lapses.

I depended on the vertical hell of other people

for story, for a narrative however broken,

a tolerance that could be that charmed or bitter,

could be what takes the place of nouns and verbs.

4

After the beautiful boy killed himself I was a mackle

of presence, a blurred capital letter that marked

a person’s breathing, while he was immaculately

gone except for all the damage to our throats

and to our umbilical selves. Touch was too much

or not enough. White space was obliterated by April’s

mute riot or was it organized into caravans stopped ...

Ah, what luxury to have his crossed letters on paper,

rationed wartime material we have now in abundance,

and map what we know in scratches and around that what?

5

Cuts, knots, rips, fissures, dots, the ink drips

from the person after the beautiful boy killed himself,

stopgap concept, the grief counselor kept it together

or at arm’s length so the ________ can’t find the ________.

I asked her for experience and I got a view from above—

grace, I’ll take it, the casserole, the pepper pot;

I’ll take the fix, the unopened bills for the services

rendered, the renderings billed. Any fix is myopic,

like a mother’s look at the child’s flaws as virtues,

as self-incrimination, the crime being the rich

attachments of subjects, objects, finishes.

6

Clouds blocked the sun all April

after the beautiful boy killed himself,

blocked by the body and the next steps, blocked

the pronouns, blocked and, blocked then,

although, before, so after the beautiful boy

we loved the jagged now for its promise and threat,

for its torn map of Detroit and its alternate plans

of duration and what was it yesterday I said

after the beautiful boy killed himself about stopping

me while I was weeping to say ghost = get = go on.

7

What energies and economies of the daily,

the obvious snows and obliteration and shoveling

disrupted when the beautiful boy killed himself?

He keeps moving down or is it up? Is there up

in the pedestrian advance to the drugstore for more

pain medication, buying a coffee to go and a doughnut?

Why not start from the start, from the hesitant

and make a progress that’s disrupted by the end,

disrupted by the currency? Are you paying for what

you break or the opposite? How do you intend to pay?

8

Come back, come back—we’re asking the highest power

of corporate capital to make you vertical once more

without metaphor—the corporeal you. We will assign the pronoun

by shareholders and trustees who will agree to your exceptional

growth potential, no, growth imperative, to the cult of you

and the evangelism of the ask. We burn, we spread like disease

but the brutal agglomeration of you we love, we pull you up

by your bootstraps, we trade in the sublime machine for you.

We will endure you as you did not endure the terrible world,

I thought after the beautiful boy killed himself.