Late Light

                                    

                             for my brother
                             (May 3, 1963 – June 20, 2012)
                                    

                                    1

You wanted oils, song, and turpentine.
You wanted priming—for distillations of fire—
but with a sculptor’s hands, fixed engines.

The world is singed between the lines.
Airwaves become a wavering of the air.

A window closes in a hospital room.
Frequencies of song pass through
the flickering exhaust—

but they are only recordings now.
The change seems less than the breath
at a dandelion,
                         less than the sexual release
of a man who thinks he can’t become a father
because he’s too young to become a father,

who will beat the son who’s born anyway.
And you, the son, would joke anyway,
making light (prismatic, deflecting).

But when you ran away—Starman
and Zeppelin passing over the walls—
when you held your bottle up to the sky,
the colors were the same: wheatfield,
stil de grain, grenache, chardonnay.
Tonight the colors pour like libations
beyond the Ventura Freeway—

the T.V. antennas and cell phone towers
like the seeds of a dandelion
drifting over dry, Mojave stones.
                             

                             2

Out of steop, steupa, steif (old words
for loss, bereft, pushed out): the step
of stepbrother, stepsister. We dropped
the syllable we didn’t need—but you
still knew your way through the chaparral
and orange groves no one wanted any longer.
I knew your escape routes and waited.
There were rumors of war and other reasons
for going to ground. In a Mormon church
you testified—I know who 666 is:
Ronald Wilson Reagan—in those years
of silos and shelters, trespasses
and echoes of the moon.
                                          Now there are
cineplexes and gated, duplicate fiefdoms
(world without end, amen).

I say this as if I had to remind you.

Ubiquitous you so often away
I must now unlearn like childhood slang,
you slip in memory to Dave, he.
                             

                             3

I went up into the hills
where nothing had yet been built
and listened to the tall grass.

His mother died young:
oat cell carcinoma, named for how
it looked under a microscope—

like tassels of wild oats in the wind.

Now it goes by other names:
secretory granules,
neuroendocrine cancer.

He didn’t know
they may have had the same disease.

He’d never go to Europe or Hawaii
(or take the exit to Zzyzx Road,
he’d said two mornings before).

He didn’t know the Saami, who
sometimes married our Finnish cousins,
believe the soul goes to the sun.

He lasted until the summer solstice.
Our cousins will light bonfires
on mountaintops tonight,

let the kids stay out all night.
                             

                             4

Dear Bishop: Do not say Death is not
the worst thing with the body
before you, the widow you didn’t know
before you in your church.
                                           Look at the hills.
The seeds are already in us. They are
what we become: the blowing field, the stalks
rising and falling until they are just chaff.

We also become the sun they rise toward.

Bless six-foot-two brothers
who used their strength
to lift small children off the ground.
Perfect love casteth out fear.

Bless wit that turns away the wrath
of the Yahwist and John of Patmos,
Genesis and Revelation.
A new law I give unto you.

A backhoe has dug out just enough space
for a single coffin. It’s like the way we slept
in the house that held eleven people.

Or nothing like it. The backhoe showers
its red dirt over him, but
he still doesn’t seem far away.

In the hills of Calabasas
the dead are as close
as sprinkler systems and landfill.

Except ye turn, and become as little children—

We would lie down on the earth.
We would roll down these hills as we did
when we came to visit his mother’s grave.

But even the sunlight loses its way
and scatters,

                                    turning red
like the soil of Calabasas, red
like light through the lids of our eyes.
                                    
                                    
                                    

The “Dear Bishop” section was originally published in Tupelo Quarterly.

The entire poem was originally published in So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Art, as the work won that journal’s 2014 Poetry Prize.