Jim Follett wrote:

>Tell them about "gorging out".
>
Ouch!

With Cornell there is a great deal of pressure on the students and
would-be students and it is unfortunate that quite a few of them do not
make it.
A very close friend of mine his younger sister was running away from her
mother and jumped off one of the stone bridges.
It is about a hundred feet down to the flat stone bed of the stream.
A friend who was a writer we are not sure if he was depressed or clumsy.
He was sitting on a parapet of the same stone bridge talking with his
friends.
They turned about and when they turned back he was gone.
Another friend, a fellow who became an apprentice to stonemasonry and
continues in the art, was with his father fishing in the inlet.
They came upon the body of a girl, a floater that had been missing.
Not such a good day for them fishing.
Around about this time I was working on a long serial poem, Gorging Out.
I was immersed in the lore and mythology and reality of people jumping
to their death.
Suddenly all these folks gorged out, and a few others did themselves in
through other means.
Including my brother's best friend who lived in our house and worked
with me.
He hung himself in his parent's basement.
A poet that I knew shot himself in the head.
For me the time provided a traumatic personal experience and for the
longest time I was afraid to have relationships. I stopped writing.
I do not know where the original manuscript is at... I'm afraid to look
for it.
It gave me a very spooky sense of relationship between ritual, sign,
symbol and reality.

][<en

from Stone Roses

And Some Break Free

My friend's sister was running
from the arms of her mother
when she came to the stone bridge
of the stone gorge and jumped
to her death,
and I sinned
with envy that she was free.

We look to our death,
a speck on peripheral vision
fading when viewed directly,
a Pleiades with naked vision
that we question our senses
if it is there a shadow distant,
or for the moment not.

I sinned, and sinned
to let my friend see
I held the dark potential within,
of sight embracing shadows
in flight within a water stone.
In the pained eyes
of each unloved child
there I see myself.
Not for them,
or around them,
but there am I.

He ran from me not knowing
into his own not knowing --
living it is easier to not know
how death begs
to always keep us running.

~

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