Excavations

To P.B.S.

Trigger warning: references to suicide

Shelley, I too know what it is
to hear the siren call of death
in cold, deep waters. All too heavily
I have felt the weight of the past
on my shoulders. And I know
at what your biographers only barely hinted:
you went willingly into the cold.
For we two are one, we who are distracted
by the dins of our egos, by
the loud revels of unseen unseelie fairies,
the noisy exuberance of crows just before dawn.

You went willingly, until the end
when you went down; the water slid her thin hand
around your throat, and squeezed;
her grip more powerful than any you could have imagined.
I know that at the last you struggled
and gasped in brine and tried to claw
your way to freedom: too late. One last flare
of lightning, one last gulp of the sea,
and you could not resist.

Hypnotized by the blare of the horn,
five hundred feet from your tomb,
I stood still as marble
and did not notice the rain pelting down
until I was hit by the bus, and down,
swearing for my life. My lungs crushed by terror and pain,
I could not even writhe against the firey water
that threatened to consume me.
I felt the icy fingers of rain caress my mouth
and knew that we were one, you and I. I knew to shake
in the presence of a passing flood.

I who have committed suicide
and lived to tell the tale, trembled in pain
and called out to a god who I had renounced,
and shook for fear of losing my life.

You did not go gently into the good night,
Shiloh my alter self. You kicked and swore and wrestled
against a watery angel, you begged
at the last. Your tomb (with its Lycidas
that does mercy to the scarred maggot
that washed ashore in the wake of your death)
is mute. Still, I knew the truth,
in a second between flash and echo.