The Ledge
From: The Ledge and Other Poems, page 3
ISBN 978-1-931002-84-4
Petaluma, 2009
“he glows for a moment
on the extremest verge.”
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Since I first heard the story
I can’t look at Morrill Hall
without seeing you, Ted Roethke,
slipping out the window
of your second story classroom
on that gray fall morning of 1935.
Easing along the thin wooden ledge
that girdles the rust colored building—
an unwieldy bear on a tightrope,
with no other purpose in mind
but to give your class the gift
of a fresh, unexplored essay topic—
(“Now watch” you told them
as you backed out the window
“Write about this.”)
I see you waving at them, making faces
through the rippling distortion
of the thick window glass.
Glowing for a moment on that ledge,
that high thin extremest verge,
just six weeks before your breakdown—
the dizzying fall from sanity
that ended your brief time here
at this Midwestern cow college,
and closed you behind the barred
windows of Mercywood Sanitarium.