Imagine spring’s thaw, your brother said,
each house a small rain, the eaves muttering
like rivers and you the white skin
the world sheds, your flesh unfolded
and absorbed. You walked Newark together,
tie loosened, a silk rainbow undone,
his fatigues the flat green of summer’s end,
all blood drained from the horizon.
It would have been easier had you music
to discuss, a common love for one
of the brutal sports, if you shared
his faith that breath and sumac are more
alike than distinct, mutations of the same
tenacity. You almost tried it for him,
cinched a belt around your arm, aimed
a needle at the bloated vein, your window
open to July’s gaunt wind and the radio
dispersing its chatty somnolence. When
he grabbed your wrist, his rightful face
came back for a moment: he was fifteen
and standing above Albert Ramos, fists
clenched, telling the boy in a voice
from the Old Testament what he’d do if certain
cruelties happened again. Loosening the belt,
you walked out, each straight and shaking,
into the hammering sun, talked of the past
as if it were a painting of a harvested field,
two men leaning against dusk and pitchforks.
That night he curled up and began to die,
his body a pile of ants and you on the floor,
ripping magazines into a mound of words
and faces, touching his forehead with the back
of your hand in a ritual of distress, fading
into the crickets’ metered hallucination.
When in two days he was human again, when
his eyes registered the scriptures of light,
when he tried to stand but fell and tried
again, you were proud but immediately
began counting days, began thinking
his name were written in a book
locked in a safe on a sunken ship,
a sound belonging to water, to history,
and let him go, relinquished him
to the strenuous work of vanishing.
