Standstill

There it is, finally, the square black box 

with a faint birr, a voltage, on my front doorstep.  

This is what is left of you, dear brother

your skull, your ribs and femurs, 

your sick liver and blistered lungs, 

your bad teeth, your voice

all drained into this box.

I’m afraid to hold you long so I sit you down 

quickly so not to drop you, trying not to tip you 

so that your fragments do not collide

and so here you sit on the window sill

which your presence makes into an altar 

so I step back with tingling and shudders, 

unable to open the box, to touch it again. 

I can only stand, still as you, stiller even

as if alone and frozen on a glacier, eyeing the

box as if there were still a ticking 

coming from your heart, as if I could smell smoke, as if 

a force pushes me away from you. 

I can’t imagine what you look like in there. 

I have read about cremation

it’s the trend now--the dead choose burning. 

They want their fillings and metal valves, plastic 

replacements melted down, smoked, 

their loose particles coming to a cool standstill, 

living only in mortal minds

that worry how to scatter them. 

On a roll

When he tells me about the tumors, he crie

and hangs up the phone 

and I call back immediately 

and lie in his ear and with encouragement 

he lies in my ear.

We do this every day, a frantic duet 

of lies flying back and forth

like homing pigeons but 

growing bigger and faster.

It does not matter to us 

if they are plausible. 

We are on a roll.
We cannot stop, we welcome 

any lies, especially miracles, 

also lies about volition 

and automatic forces, 

lies that keep us blind 

and the terror down, lies

that take us out of this world,
lies that make us go limp

from head to heart, that

help us bend far away from

what is beaming down. 

Slump

Even in the early pictures, my brother 

sitting in his stroller, you can tell
our father isn't satisfied.

Already there's an inward drooping 

in the baby’s eyes 

that mirrors the slump in our father’s face 

looking past the child toward something 

awful that left its mark on him.  

There's nothing wrong with this boy 

but his father’s snub ages him and

poor health stalks like a lion in the weeds.

And so my brother clings to our mother's love, 

and to mine, sometimes thin 

as a blade of grass, 

but not loving him is too hard 

a pill for us to swallow. 

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. 

While I wait

While I wait in the ICU for him to wake, I think about oblivion. 

I think oblivion is only one interpretation, the earthling one. 

The notion of beginnings and endings--a human obsession--important 

for hunting and farming, for invention, for winning, for all human endeavors, 

for the purpose of living on earth without anxiety.  

I think about continuity, the cosmos as hyper-vast web of pulsing 

strings, of interwoven layers of shapes (the bacilli inside him,

my husband, the bed, window, clouds, stars, quasars, black holes) 

in perpetual motion.

While waiting in the ICU, I think about the cosmos expanding.  

The galaxies to my earth eye seem as blooms of light, lanterns 

flashing in the dark, white skin between black holes of fishnet stockings, 

silver fish darting in midnight water, until we look closer, 

deeper into their patterns, down to the layer of atoms and sub-atoms 

where the sublime gossamer scaffolding of air, water, fish, pebbles, 

leaves fan out into an eternity of almighty light and dark--

galactic and infinitesimal. 

Here in the ICU, I wait in a state of bewilderment 

as I consider sizes, distances, spheres, layers, nettings, flashings, 

burstings, orbitings of this beatific and frightening order 

that repeatedly assembles and reassembles.