Suicide is Painless...

Well, another weekend of work done and over. Another weekend of spontaneous head bleeds from ruptured blood vessels, fall down drunkards with expanding brain bruises crowding and pushing one side towards the other, and self-inflicted gun shot wounds to the head. Actually, less of a wound as much as the kind of massive injury that a 9mm can inflict on soft tissue.

So, a quiet morning at home listening to the dog snore and the wind loosening the leaves from their seasonal lodgings. Our old, now crazy, cat is walking around the first floor howling while we keep reminding her that come on, we're over here, sitting on the couch. Hubby's on the phone with the utilities company trying to sort out a bill and rooting through his espionage defying file of "Important Papers."

Second cup of coffee is still warm and delicious next to me and I'm soon to check my university email to see if I have any important updates before school starts next week. I haven't seen any list of required texts yet. Maybe the sticker price is so steep that they prefer to tell you in person. With smelling salts. My daughters believe the lateness is planned so you have to buy the book immediately at the university bookstore and don't have time to search around for a cheaper version. Quite the crafty minxes.

I'm trying to tuck away the memory of my patient's swollen and unrecognizable face, but instead find myself wondering through the morning's rituals how his wife will ever be able to go back to their home.


A Morning In Autumn

by W.S. Merwin



Here late into September
I can sit with the windows
of the stone room swung open
to the plum branches still green
above the two fields bare now
fresh-plowed under the walnuts
and watch the screen of ash trees
and the river below them

and listen to the hawk's cry
over the misted valley
beyond the shoulder of woods
and to lambs in a pasture
on the slope and a chaffinch
somewhere down in the sloe hedge
and silence from the village
behind me and from the years

and can hear the light rain come
the note of each drop playing
into the stone by the sill
I come slowly to hearing
then all at once too quickly
for surprise I hear something
and think I remember it
and will know it afterward

in a few days I will be
a year older one more year
a year farther and nearer
and with no sound from there on
mute as the native country
that was never there again
now I hear walnuts falling
in the country I came to


please note: art by Woodhull Adams