The Spot

Right there, across Memorial Drive from the Charles River,
At the corner of the side street that leads to the ball fields
And the performing-arts pavilion, in view of the Pru
And the Hancock building on the glassy Boston skyline;

There — right there — I was tempted to stop in my tracks
And warn the tall, clean-cut kid standing against the wall
With his eyes on the gadget in the palm of his left hand,
A furrowed expression on his well-shaven face, a Red Sox cap
On his well-trimmed head, and a silver watch on his wrist,

That if he was in the least superstitious, susceptible to a fear
Of ghosts, unlucky numbers, black cats, ladders,
And things of that nature, then he’d better vacate the place,
Just keep on moving, and linger there no longer,
Because I happened to know, having walked by the spot
On my way home from rambling along the river one night —
From crossing over on one bridge and coming back on another —
That something haunted had happened there one time;

That I had been halfway back, across the Mass Ave. bridge,
When I saw the flashing lights and heard the wailing sirens
Of an ambulance and a cop car in the distance along the river;

That I had tried, without success, to avoid the temptation
To walk home that longer way and see what was happening,
Instead of taking my usual route through Central Square,
And had seen with my own eyes, a few minutes after
The medics took the body away, the white Oxford shirt
Blotted with scarlet blood on the gray cement sidewalk
Where the medics had left it for the city to take away
In the hazardous waste van, and the red and white lights
Of the ambulance wailing toward the hospital morgue.

Right there, I wanted to say, right there on the sidewalk, feet
From where he stood at the corner of the side street
And Memorial Drive; there — where the despondent grad
Of MIT, or so I learned later, still living in a fraternity house
Five years after graduation, jumped from the roof-top deck
To his death that night, during April spring break
When all the fraternity brothers were away on vacation
And his monstrous self-doubt, his depressive psychosis,
His delusions and nightmares, had him all to themselves.

 



Click here to read Scott Ruescher on the origin of the poem.

Image by cottonbro studio on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

Scott Ruescher:

Once I’m done working on a poem and have gotten that satisfied sense which WB Yeats compared to the sound of a lid snapping a box shut, I don’t much care to look back through the multiple drafts. I know what I’ll find there anyway—all the elements of the poem that I was trying to put in emphatic order but that, due to clunky syntax and the like, I couldn’t quite do without the necessary spirit and momentum; mechanical-sounding drafts that were less, rather than more, than the sum of their parts.

Like Yeats again, “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/I sought it daily for six weeks or so,” sitting there at my laptop mumbling the drafts aloud to myself, shifting things around to get the sound and sense right, rearranging the information in different ways, rewriting sentences to generate a tidal momentum, folding, unfolding, and refolding the syntax of the poem over and over, in multiple permutations, like some kind of anxious origami artist hoping not to exhaust the strength of the paper before it can start to resemble a crane.

That’s how it went with “The Spot,” until I managed to clear some of the deadwood, align some of the information with parallel structures, and let the poem maintain a singular focus on the event in question.

My condolences to the survivors of the young man who took his own life that night.

Scott Ruescher
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