A Perfect Suicide

A Perfect Suicide

A Perfect Suicide

And here I will sacrifice all rhyme,
that is, I will avoid any of the beautiful
consequences which may intrude on patterns
infinitely more inter-calculable — I shall
be in a world of egregious simplicity,
protected by a cold dependency.

Yet I bungled my own death,
kept alive for days trying to analyse
for friends and fellow-architects
why melancholy has a concave shape
and whether Heaven, ordered to design
a ceiling, would stand in its own light.

Seeing is beneath believing, which is why
air is stonier than its vista — as in my portrait
the set-squares and the compasses make Signs
of the Cross more Christian than the Cross
upon my breast and sleeve. The Pyramids
were told that weight was Incarnation.

Socrates died of a morphic sort of rictus,
Seneca in a steamy froth of blood,
I with a muddle of indignity and plans.
To kill oneself as perfectly as a line
will reach a tributary line
is masonry continuing in one stay.