Poem
Peter Porter
A Perfect Suicide
A Perfect Suicide
A Perfect Suicide
And here I will sacrifice all rhyme,that is, I will avoid any of the beautiful
consequences which may intrude on patterns
infinitely more inter-calculable — I shall
be in a world of egregious simplicity,
protected by a cold dependency.
Yet I bungled my own death,
kept alive for days trying to analyse
for friends and fellow-architects
why melancholy has a concave shape
and whether Heaven, ordered to design
a ceiling, would stand in its own light.
Seeing is beneath believing, which is why
air is stonier than its vista — as in my portrait
the set-squares and the compasses make Signs
of the Cross more Christian than the Cross
upon my breast and sleeve. The Pyramids
were told that weight was Incarnation.
Socrates died of a morphic sort of rictus,
Seneca in a steamy froth of blood,
I with a muddle of indignity and plans.
To kill oneself as perfectly as a line
will reach a tributary line
is masonry continuing in one stay.
© 2008, Peter Porter
From: Poetry Review, 98:2
Publisher: Poetry Review, London
From: Poetry Review, 98:2
Publisher: Poetry Review, London
Peter Porter
(Australia, 1929)
Peter Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1929. He moved to London in 1951, and became associated with ‘The Group’ of poets including Martin Bell and Phillip Hobsbaum. Porter worked in bookselling and advertising before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster in 1968, working for The Observer as poetry critic. In 1999, OUP published two volumes of Porter’s poetry covering the years 19...
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A Perfect Suicide
And here I will sacrifice all rhyme,that is, I will avoid any of the beautiful
consequences which may intrude on patterns
infinitely more inter-calculable — I shall
be in a world of egregious simplicity,
protected by a cold dependency.
Yet I bungled my own death,
kept alive for days trying to analyse
for friends and fellow-architects
why melancholy has a concave shape
and whether Heaven, ordered to design
a ceiling, would stand in its own light.
Seeing is beneath believing, which is why
air is stonier than its vista — as in my portrait
the set-squares and the compasses make Signs
of the Cross more Christian than the Cross
upon my breast and sleeve. The Pyramids
were told that weight was Incarnation.
Socrates died of a morphic sort of rictus,
Seneca in a steamy froth of blood,
I with a muddle of indignity and plans.
To kill oneself as perfectly as a line
will reach a tributary line
is masonry continuing in one stay.
From: Poetry Review, 98:2
A Perfect Suicide
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