Ropeburn

I imagine the shades being half-drawn
forty-something years ago
in that haggard apartment in Haverstraw--
high enough to illuminate the shabby
hardwood floor in need of a good sanding
and a new coat of varnish, low enough to
hide what he was doing from the neighbors.
It's a second-story rental in a low-income
part of town, right above a bodega.
The room he's in is vacant
except for the wooden chair he used
to tie his knot up high
and the dusty baseboard covers.
Maybe I see it that empty because it really was
or maybe I'm just not creative enough to fill it right now
or maybe I'm afraid to look around my own room, room's I've had.
Regardless, it has one of those half-hexagonal
shapes to the street-side, the middle window cracked
where a rock had mysteriously hit it the previous summer.
And then there's that exposed rafter running along
the length of it that enabled his final endeavor.

I can't picture his face, but I have a strong feeling
that he was wearing a blue sweater for some reason.
The rope was one he'd stolen from his after-school job
at the fish market; the detectives figured that out
from the smell when they cut him down.
No, that's incorrect; they wouldn't have been able
to smell much aside from the pile of excrement
that had slid down his leg and out of his cuffed jeans
after he stopped thrashing around.
They don't show you that part in the movies
but I know it's there.
If his mother had found him maybe she would've
cleaned up his mess before the cops arrived to the scene
to spare him that last embarrassment, but it was
his old man who kicked in the door that evening.
He knew that any dignity his son once had
was gone no matter what.

The local paper bid a vague farewell.
There was no moment of silence at school.
It's never as dramatic as one that desperate hopes.
They never get to see that, sadly.
And the ones who fail only learn how little people care.

My mother merely mentioned it once in passing.
The part of me that tries to remember the sequence
of events in a less shameful way wants to say
that she told me after my own little episode
but I'm not entirely sure.
One of the first things she said when she saw me
afterwards was "I forgive you."
Her eyes were off somewhere else, though
as if she were looking right through me
and speaking to another person-- perhaps
the boy whose heart she accidentally broke as a teenager
by saying she wouldn't date him
despite his best speech.
She was the only one who really knew why
there was one less student in the Graduating Class of '72
at North Rockland High School.

I doubt she went to her prom, either.

I'm raising rabbits instead of having children.