found this poem in my old LiveJournal from 2003, posted 23 years ago:
comminuit brum a rainy day when he can't play outside and Henry is cutting little axes out of a piece of card- board he bloodies them up nicely with red crayon and then very lovingly one after another brings them to me at my desk where I'm work- ing as if they were flowers.
And at first I wondered—re-discovering this only a moment ago, knowing what I do now of the author’s life that I might not have known then, when I posted it, tears almost brimming as I suddenly realized—if this might have been a moment from the life of James Laughlin, in unbearable tenderness, with his son (and written while the latter was still a very small boy). The same son who would, years later, in his twenties, kill himself. The image of blood, even more heartwrending when framed as something beautiful brought to him. It seems that the little Henry mentioned here, however, is likely his other son, whom Laughlin survived, while Robert was his son who died that way. Still…I remembered the other poem—written afterward, certainly about Robert, certainly regarding blood, and certainly blood delivered to him, too, just as helplessly:
I never knew there was so much blood in a man until my son killed himself. I had to wipe away the blood it took me four hours to do it but I couldn't have asked anyone else because after all it was my blood too.