Poets in Michigan
by Jill Krupnik
Laura Riding jumped out of a fourth-floor window. Perhaps you didn’t know this and why would you? A minor poet, unlikely to be casually studied in high school, not when there was Brooks or Wordsworth or Whitman or Frost to be read (so much Frost that you should have had that damned “Two roads” poem memorized by graduation, which of course you did not). And anyway, even if you had read her, it was unlikely that the teacher would have mentioned that she had tried to commit suicide by jumping from the window on the fourth floor; nor that her love had, to prove that he was devoted to her, truly he was, really but not too much, no he was not that stupid, jumped too, but after having run down to the story below. The second or third. He lived. So did she, amazingly so even after the shock, even after the crash of a landing, even after the earth broke her fall and every bone of her body.
You can’t keep falling forever. You can live after.
And anyway, it’s unlikely a kindly English teacher would have told you anything so salacious. Poets and authors were pretty sexless back in Michigan. Their lives dull ones, their deaths too. Who knows what Plath-obsessed girlfriend told you about a gas stove. Or which dark-eyed beauty bemoaned Anne Sexton’s monoxide asphyxiation. Or perhaps no one told you, or perhaps you read it somewhere or perhaps you have just learned this all now.
I'm not saying that you will repeat the mistakes of the past, but I am saying that a fourth floor is closer to the ground than you think.
Jill Krupnik is a writer in Brooklyn, NY and misses being able to write at bars.
