for my brother

What a beautiful guy my brother was,
Music was his heart.
It must have started with the lyric
Of being born to sound
And dancing in infant space.
It must have started when an angel
Left behind a harp and trumpet
And he composed his life around music.
He spent every penny on the perfect note,
And introduced us all
To the sounds he was hearing.
His silence still ringing in my ears.

At the table, discussing
Those we’ve lost to time
And the cancers of living,
While outside
The rain’s long green grief
Falls over my woodlot
Like the tears of God
Grieving what we were
Who we are
What we’ve become.
The wind’s chrism cloths
Then soak up the water
But grief grips the leaves
Slowly dripping
In those tender drops
That fall softly from your eyes.

For everyone,
This drop of potion
And fair sustenance.
For everyone,
A portion of peace,
The death of war.
For everyone
Some painlessness
And cheerful memory.
For everyone,
This teardrop of joy.
For everyone, this love.
This sadness and love.

I will love you even when I am gone.
I will love you even when I am dust.
What has flowered cannot be undone.
It exists like the lotus, in overlapping existences.
Love is not the body nor the soul.
It is something written with our ashes.
It is the last star in a barren skull.
It is the gleam of light on unearthed bone.
The creator of love
Did not mean it to be perfect, but forever.

I tried to wake my mother.
I said “mom” and “mom,”
nudged her shoulder
and took her hand in mine.
I tried to raise the dead
with love.
I thought that she
would recognize me,
but it was I
who began to recognize death.
It was my mother,
but her body had another face–
peaceful, timeless
and other.

To my surprise
the more guns I fired
the more I liked it

I was good
I found the center every time
I took aim at time

My stillness was lethal

It wasn’t the smell of gun powder—
but the strange sense of distance

The hunter came out of me
the avenger appeared
the killer neared

I raised a revolver
and called the world a liar

The cabinet was always locked.
A kid should not touch a gun.
I’d gaze through the glass
Hunting in forbidden forests.

The rifles standing at attention,
The wood figuring and inlays artistic,
A deer with antlers in reeds,
The walnut almost burning.

The cabinet taller than the room,
My reflection in the glass
Shot between the eyes with wonder
Through the iron sights of time.

Words are ghosts in the machinery
As signifiers they are the coins
Of economy reaching through time
The qualia of consciousness
Swarming around the mind
Clutching the shoreline of being
One by one, I learn another
And my debt grows larger
My depth deepens with difference
The ghosts continue to appear
They are present in everything I do
And I leave them behind as I go
Owing more than I could show

It’s something special,
almost spectral
when clouds pass
and trees flood with light,
almost tropical green
against a dark sky,
as though, in the blink of an eye,
I am present in another world.

Your aunt’s smiling face,
Your uncle’s hand
Passing a phone receiver through the space
Like a voice from the other side.

For prolonged periods
There is nothing but half a calendar,
Half a clock
And the feet of Jesus
On the far kitchen wall–
Empty space
And the bottom half of time.

Not even a vanishing point
Only the empty face of time
Through such a small space.

An arched passage,
Like the shrine
Of an invisible saint,
To whom I offered
Long afternoons of my childhood.