William Fargason - Three Poems

Absence, 1999

I almost failed the fifth grade I missed

so many days out sick a head full of congestion

still not sure why I hadn’t learned yet

that old school was full of dust and mold

and mildew my yet-to-be determined allergies

one day when feeling good enough to go

the teacher across the hall wasn’t there the class

of children hushed and the next day she wasn’t

there again my friend Adam on the playground

he told me she killed herself which at that age

I didn’t even know was an option I wouldn’t

have believed him had I not seen her students

crying in the hallway crying on the playground

the swings not moving up or down but stuck still

even then with my limited imagination I imagined

she did it in her backyard the grass long

one stone bench in the center the honeysuckle

surrounding her like the frame of a picture I don’t know

why I remember what I do but it would only be

a few years until I got allergy shots two in each arm

twice a week it would only be a few years until

I became healthier physically but not mentally

a sadness was the only word I had for what came

and never lifted it would only be a few years

until I was sick in the way she was sick

A Suicide, 1996

At a restaurant with my parents,

I would go to the drink machine

by myself, hear the ice being frozen

and dropped in the chute behind

the blue glow of the Pepsi sign.

I would push my cup against

each lever, mixing each liquid

into a dark haze. The kids at school

called this drink a suicide. Why,

I wasn’t sure then or now. But

I would take that fizzing cup

to my lips like a blessed sacrament,

like this was my creation, I would

drink it all down until the bottom.

The carbonation would swell

in my chest, building like

the panic attacks that would visit

like some dark angel in the night.

And when my own depression

almost killed me that one time

or that other time—each time

my head was a cup foaming over,

one I held, filled, and drank from,

over and over again.

After

I can look back now. The aspens in

their yellow glow. My eyes full of thistle

and rosemary. It wasn’t a nervous breakdown.

It was. It wasn’t my first. It wasn’t

the last time I held a blade in the light, watching

my face fall into and out of its own reflection.

I’m not sure how many more I’ll survive.

Red chokecherry. A dogwood in full flower.

The floor of grass, a wallpaper of white blossoms.

Every tree contains the lumber it could become.

I have the words for it now. There is a category

for my sadness. That doesn’t make me feel it

any less. The head of the nail is hit with

the hammer. Into the wood it drives deeper.

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William Fargason is the author of Velvet (Northwestern University Press, 2024) and Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of lowa Press, 2020). His poems have

appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He lives with himself in College Park, Maryland.