Two Boys: A rundown

Kelly's "Two Boys" is a sophisticated depiction of the emotional after-effects that follow a suicide. I had to read the poem a few times to be sure though that the death portrayed is a suicide, for reasons I'll explain in a moment. First, the two key signifiers that anchor the subject (since, in The Orchard, subjects can sometimes be hard to pin down):

• "The boy drowned [...] / And it no accident" (pg. 30).

So, murder? No.

• "And if a life takes its own life?"

Kelly moves through an (appropriately) unsettling likening between a person committing suicide, a dog fighting its own strangulation, and the difficulty of stamping out a fire ("Greenness like fire will not swiftly stamp out..."). The simple word, Greenness, is an expertly-chosen one to express the boy's youth and wasted potential. This sentiment is more directly conveyed in the following lines:

• "There would / Have been a better time. Or place. Better."

The enjambment hangs emphasis on the wistful phrase, There would, which succinctly encapsulates the constant subjunctive thinking that lingers in the minds of those left in the wake of another's suicide.

The narrative, though not entirely devoid of Kelly's characteristic obscure trailing imagery ("Or an insect dressed in robes of white / And robes of green?"), is fairly direct to this point. She then, though, moves into an exploration of the fated-ness of suicide that threw me off on my first reading.

• "By fate, what is it? Who met the boy / By daylight? And how did he know him? By / What seal on the forehead? Talon or star?"

Though I can make little of the "Talon or star?" juxtaposition, I found that Talon=Talos=Sun, and in Revelations there are many references to forehead marks that determine a person's punishment or salvation (e.g., Rev. 9:4: "And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads"). Loosely, she seems to be questioning what it was within this boy that sealed this fate for him. She continues this thread:

"Who raised the curtain?

Who prompted the action? Who conceived

It in the first place? What prophet in what

Dark room? Did he weep when he wrote

Down the words?"

I had personal trouble here (which probably led to my difficulty understanding) because I have a HUGE chip on my shoulder against any depictions of suicide as being out of the control of the individual (bias disclaimer). I love love love the sense of struggle she shows; it's perfectly normal to have questions like Did God know this was going to happen? How could this be someone's fate? after a suicide, but the drawn-out-ness of Kelly's exploration of the theme made me uneasy with the amount of agency the poem seems to deny the boy who drowned himself. ["Uneasy," though, is obviously a frequently targeted reaction to the poems in The Orchard, so in fact, this one falls right in line (and not really in a bad way).]

Kelly shifts focus to those affected by the wake of a suicide (here embodied by a second boy who discovers the first's corpse):

• "And so we have a story. But still the story / Does not end."

It doesn't. Continuing her use of shadow imagery (as something that haunts) from previous poems, she describes the permanence of the trauma that follows those who are affected firsthand by suicide:

"And then he saw what he saw, and he knew
From this day forward, for better or worse,
For worse or better, he would carry this shadow
Of no certain shape" (31).

I believe this is one of the only poems that can be read literally in The Orchard. I dug it for this reason—for the fact that it seems to describe something that actually could happen, rather than a drug-trip-nightmare—and for its nuanced treatment of difficult feelings that arise from a very difficult situation.