My brother is cremated

As soon as I wake up, I think 

of his body 

cold and stoney, plastic-wrapped,

naked and raw in a freezer 

until tomorrow 

when they heave him into the kiln

and roast my brother.

They said it will take four hours--after all 

he’s a hulk--until heat will rise from him again, 

and he will glow--and that moment 

when he gives off the light 

of a fourth of July sparkler, 

that moment he spits out his last bursts

before fading dark--that moment 

will be the highlight

of my day.

Love

Down the basement stairs my megalomania 

pushes my cheerful family dog. 

Among father's beer barrels and brother’s bikes, 

with pleasure I listen to her bleating and desperate 

scratching, her lunges against the door behind 

which I sit and smile. 

Not until her anguish reaches a piteous pitch

do I open the door to receive her exuberant love,

those wet, whimpering kisses, that earnest scrambling

to crawl inside of me. 

This is the love I crave as a child but find nowhere else 

and so I stage it over and over and over again--

and not only then, but long after with boys 

who try to love me.


I make their love clearly visible to me. 

My brother enters hospice

There’s just me and it, he tells me, 

breaking down again. It feels like 50 below in here—

he cries, he's freezing, 

turning on heaters, adding layers. 

It sits on his chest.  He gurgles and gags, 

he must sit up, he gasps, and then it sits 

beside me on the chair, leaning right on me

—this thing that exiles me too

from my own life. 

The problem is we are so alone with it. 

Not just with it but with his vicious moods. 

We don't believe in perpetual light  

though we long for it, he and I are 

greedy for more of all that's wild 

and not dying.

Then comes his fury 

so profane it breaks me some days. 

Each moment he remembers it, he rages 

against it. 

The problem is I can do nothing but accept 

a truth that grows harder every day 

whenever I look into his unready eyes.