Where better to read than in the bed
of a pickup truck as it hauls 80 mph west
on I – 70 at 8 a.m., your body huddled
against the cold of a curling backdraft?

I see you now as then, as if on fire
with fire of words heating
your half-gloved hands,
nothing in late September snow

moving you from the moving record
of new truth that wraps your eyes
around each word it's fleshed in
as your blanket encases you igloo-like,

your attention to the text
impervious to windy speed and icy weather
around your woolen hat,
sentences and paragraphs pulled down

around your ears and scarved
around your neck as in
the direct light of sunrise
you turn each page without

a flap of the paper,
your concentration steeling
the pages into thin plates, firm
statements of wisdom in the flux

and fury of travel through Indiana
and time, the turning leaves
of autumn, like the highway hawk,
flapping and floating in golden silhouette

against your pentecostal gaze etching
as a burin into zinc an intaglio design,
a perfect engraving of who a reader is,
of how a reader can always be to read.

I Sing of Those Who Die by Suicide

     for Robert Hemington Ford

We should think and talk of them as brave,
and not as we define the word, for what
do we know about how and what it is
to face all the darkness of ourselves each
hour, each day, all the world of woe pressed in
a ball so dense that if we tried to carry it
across a room we would fail, while they
had to carry it when they were not
invited by themselves into the room:

they carried it across the abyss
between the walls for months and years, a ball
as dense and as small as Persephone's
pomegranate seed, though unlike her they
never could return with climbing sprigs of spring,
as if only half half-alive they watched
her rise in still brown (not golden, not green)
forsythia and corn, as the dark seed
in the gut continued to tear their smooth
muscles inside, perpetual ulcers
of the heart, unseen by scopes, unrelieved
by any therapy or chemo, wounds
of the mind unhealed by drugs or hugs or
upward tugs against the constant grave weight
of the dense ball or seed; like them, we too

suffer loss and loss upon loss, but the floor
in our room at least has a board or beams
(however hewn or found or built) placed across
the abyss between the walls that we
can see in the light or half-light of day;

perhaps they too had a board or beams,
but when darkness devours light and the night
of day drives the darkness into the dawn,
past any possible dawn of a dawn,
how hard to know where to place a first foot
or two, or if good luck holds, a next step;

although not brave as most define the word,
the black thought of trying to walk across
the abyss harrows me with fear, not fear
and wonder, but fear alone, as if I
can imagine a hail storm quick and fell
that lasts a full year, or more, bruising,
denting, blasting more than ferns or wings or
chestnut blooms; like those with cancer, those we
know or read about, they too did not ask
for ceaseless hail, did not want to lack
the board or beams, did not choose perpetual
disease; they too would like to drink pop or beer
at stadiums in the sun, or taste sharp
mustard on pretzels once again, or see
honeybees fly out of a tulip's mouth,
or touch dear lips with theirs in rooms at least
dim with light from candles or waning fires;

although not brave as most define the word,
they are, like each person killed by a hit
and run, and each person with cancer ripe,
not cowardly at all; they too endured
to the end, through unending storms of hail
and the darkness vast; they too (no less than
any of the blessed dead) – like Joanne
and Rob, who swim now the rivers of light
(she whom I could never kiss, he whom I
once held in my teenage arms) – are safe, safe.

John Kryder teaches English at Williamsville East High School, and in 1993 received an NEH Fellowship in African Literature. Throughout his teaching career, he has written, read, and published poetry. He has read from his work at The New York State English Council, at Trinity Place in Buffalo, and at The Meeting House in Williamsville. Five of his poems have been set to music by high school, college, and professional musicians, including the poem he wrote for Dr. Stephen Shewan's choral and orchestral work entitled "Hymn for Spring," published by Albany Records. Poems from his unpublished manuscript, In The Heart of Now, have appeared in The Buffalo News and at Trinity Place. He has conducted workshops on poetry and music with Dr. Shewan at the high school, university, and state levels, and on poetry and art with Buffalo artist Catherine Parker.