ELEGY

Some of the last poems that I wrote tracked the dissolution and death of my brother.

Time and tide had abraded my lyricism, and turned my verse angular and ironic.

Taurus

Have you ever seen
The ashing of a soul?

The agent fire
Beating its black wings

To rise above
The trespass of a song

Jeff showed up for Thanksgiving dinner with a bloated belly, sitting high on his thin frame. My mother, who had seen this before in dramatic close up, knew instantly that he was in real trouble. I tried to reassure her that it was a simple beer belly, but to her the complexities were clear.

A month later I was called to the emergency room. The slow course of suicide was beginning to have its effects.

Compulsion

Do not worry about the cups--
They are in the 2nd drawer,
Prone, interlocked,
On top of your cassettes
And the box of sour gum + hard candy.
Do not worry--
They preceded you by a bottomless age,
And will float past your death
To eternity.

We sat in Jeff's room at Mt Sinai Hospital, biding the time with small talk and periodic glances up at an elevated TV. The murmur of passing daytime talk shows filled the empty holes in the conversation.

He was propped in bed, a new liver sewn inside to yank him back from the edge. And still he was typically condescending and gruff, particularly to my mother. He fussed about things of no consequence, culminating in a blowup regarding some misplaced cups.

When my mother left the room, I shot him a look informed by a mix of plain disgust and pity. “She drives 100 miles to see you here almost every fucking day, and you treat her like this?” I hissed, “The way you've always treated her.”

I drove back home with my mother, still furious at Jeff's behavior. “I know he loves me,” she said, “And he doesn't have anyone else. I'm his mother.”

Elegy morphine

Are you
worthy of
the putrid swans

whose sooty wings extended
War with
Grace

The funeral was quiet and quick. An urn with Jeff's ashes was interred not more than 200 yards from the altar on which the service was offered, in the graveyard on the grounds of the 'Neath the bell tower church.

Because my father was in the army, my mother has a plot reserved for her in the local national cemetery. But she waived that right some years ago, opting instead for a spot on the church grounds right next to my brother.

My life as a poet ended about a dozen years ago.

I live now a narrative life. A life that requires narrative. A life that could not stand on lyrics.

But I will never forget who I was, I will never forget what I was:

A poet...