Brother
It’s the moon and the stars I’m asking,
stalking them through pine and maple,
for a sign or the gentlest of intimations.
But my tongue is the wing
of another dead sparrow
with no whisper. I can’t pray exactly,
only sense passing through me
a starlight that’s been falling this way for centuries
like salt, some kind of brilliant, crystalline evil,
or worse, it’s nothing
but a sensation. Here’s the story,
half about my brother,
recently gone to ground,
not getting the rights salts
or the full spectrum of light
he needs from Big Pharma
or Big Random or, if you like, Whomever,
who must have taken a wrong turn, again.
Late, I phone and ask after what I already know,
though he still throws me when he answers
that this time the blow was as sudden as an ax
to the head, a stump burning, blowing sparks
and collapsing so it’s been like being on fire
but not being able to run out of himself
or keep the long wick of his back
from curling so he’s been sitting or walking
around hunched, sometimes pretending to be
working, sometimes just watching others slip
like otters through air slick as water. The hospital
gave him foam slippers and a little white note
for his employer so his sticking around
home now is more than small
pocket heroics, you know, to rise
every day from a bed of ash and hang
near the ceiling that way, for as long
as it’s going to take, patient,
curling, quiet as smoke.
When he stops speaking, we both read,
imperfectly, the text of our silence.
We both know the weather, the scores,
the stations to go which are many.
We’re just trying, hearts trying
by staying here, letting the air go on beating us
about the ears, our pulses beating, fleetingly
in synch, those seconds flaring like comets,
rich with the nearness that saves us.
Another Evening Interlude
I am sitting in the yard watching an early evening
blanket my lap and my ankles, watching
sparrow flit by, though thinking of the portly
Edwardian pigeons I know the city is poisoning
where they roost atop the grain silos above Divisadero.
Below them is the wide canal that twists through town.
Below, the ex-cons rubbing cars and trucks at the car wash,
toss the dead ones into a can.
At dusk the red light pours easily over the fences,
roof rats scoot in fits and starts, beads
crossing the telephone lines, racking time.
My black-hooded terrier whines and trembles,
and I am sitting here swallowing back a few small barks
and what feels like the hollow bones of wrens,
a wasp nest of paper.
I hear doves.
I think I could coo.
I think I could’ve been poisoned.
I think I have lived here too long,
listing my sorrows
for anyone to see
and fault me should they care.
How often have I broken
bread with the quick, small birds
dropping near? There, that one is Joy,
there, his twin, Terror.
I close my eyes and recall the old fools,
who drank a little too much wine
standing near the temple gates,
mendicant, holy,
and think, I may have got it wrong.
Maybe it’s time I bury a plaster Francis
of Assisi—the way the realtor said,
or was it St. Joseph?—sell the property,
move to the desert and give myself up
to all that burning overhead,
electric, that city, asylum
of fat chance with its shrieking
and the everywhere dying
odor of cigarette smoke, disinfectant, urine.
I could live on discounted dinner rolls, pads of butter,
fried eggs and onions.
I could think of myself as an unemployed Hollywood
extra, keep it a secret,
wear sunglasses,
ride the smooth elevators,
letting my mind,
as if out of ancient, dead seas,
glide the hotel corridors, contained,
like a dark manta ray.