Jim Everhard

 

    Who talks of victory? To endure is all.
      – Rainer Maria Rilke

Together we visited the lakes
in Massachusetts and an old man
stopped us at one particularly
beautiful one and told us
three people in the last year had
taken their life there. We were amazed,
the surface looked so serene,
we even heard a fish jump. Two women,
He said, and a man. The man was
very young, in his early teens,
And the women, both were in their forties.
No one suspected any of them
would do it. The women chose
winter, and it was a harsh one,
and the young man, the end of summer,
one that lingered on into October.
Well, he said, it was understandable
afterwards. The husbands were planning
to leave their wives. The boy had always
acted a little peculiar. But no one, he said,
would ever know the full reason. The water
was so still and deep and clear.

 

Jim Everhard is the author of a book of poems, Cute (1982). He grew up in Northern Virginia, served in the US Navy from 1966 to 1970, and spent the next eleven years working on a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from George Mason University. He lived in Dupont Circle, Washington D.C. through the 1980s, until his early death from AIDS in 1986.