The Suicide (Knox College, 1965)

We knew of Hegel and Marx,

had heard of Kierkegaard,

but he had read their books,

and dismissed our meanderings  

through theodicy and First Causes,

pouring out a fine scorn,

a contempt for unfinished thought.

As we joyfully shed our devotions,

he shunned our eager doubts,

and our easy agnosticism,

embracing the risk of knowledge,

and demanded we make choices.

We wilted from such scrutiny,

conscious of our nakedness

in the probing of his lights,

scrambling for the shadows

during frenzied late nights

spent with angels and eternities.

He spread out his conclusions

in the clearest of detail:

no one seemed more confident

of the geography of truth,

but behind that mask of certainty

were the terrors of an abyss—

artfully concealed, never confessed—

and there were no footprints  

left from his walk to the last place,

its downed curtain and broken glass.

Dumbly, we survivors—

numbed by his willfulness  

and neither brilliant nor informed—

did the duties of the living,

trooped off to his funeral in the town

where he had never been at home,

neither with room for the other;

found no comfort in the solemnities,

and said the wrong things

to a distraught mother and a silent father.
Returning home to beer and History 301,

the last papers and final exams,

so young and still so far

from the words and means

to finish a grieving,

we waited for the end of May

when we could close a door

and leave this world behind,    

make our escape into summer.