Poet's Choice

When prose cult figure David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Sept. 12, he succumbed to the depression that's murdered too many literary titans. The loss slammed into my solar plexus like a black medicine ball, knocking the wind out of me. Almost 20 years back when David crossed my path, I was battling my own black mood, and David tried -- patiently, assiduously -- to cheer me up. He softly thwacked tennis balls at me and edited my paltry attempts at an essay. Thanks to him, I'd find in my office mailbox rap mix tapes he'd annotated with his not-yet-famous footnotes.

Those days, I was still young enough to indulge my misery by rereading John Berryman's "He Resigns," penned shortly before he leapt into the Mississippi River: "Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts./Her having gone away/in spirit from me. Hosts/of regrets come & find me empty.//I don't feel this will change./I don't want any thing/or person, familiar or strange./I don't think I will sing // any more just now;/or ever. . . ."

How could David's manic genius have gone as dark as this? I'd assumed, from our scant communication during the past decade, that we'd both outgrown our melancholia. For days, I've trolled my poetry shelves for the right words to grieve with, the way an insomniac pharmacist -- desperate for sleep -- might pick through her tinctures. At first, I sought Heather McHugh's sweet variation on Rilke's goodbye poem, which is spoken by a dying man: "My friend, I must leave you./Do you want to see/the place on a map?/It's a black dot. // Inside myself, if things/all go as planned, it will/become a point of rose/in a green land."

Rilke's afterlife here becomes an eternity of green in which he can blossom like a rose, as no doubt David will in the minds of his devoted readers. But, ultimately, this childhood snapshot by Weldon Kees, a poet and presumed suicide, captures the innocent melody of my early friendship with David, while permitting -- sandwiched in the center stanza -- some rage against adding his death to the planet's roster of horror:

1926

The porchlight coming on again,

Early November, the dead leaves

Raked in piles, the wicker swing

Creaking. Across the lots

A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives

Of neighbors, mapped and marred

Like all the wars ahead, and R.