[Image description: a poem by Elisa Gonzalez titled “After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad,” published in the New Yorker on April 18, 2020. She won the 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and is working on her first book.
The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair.
The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don’t have the virus, it’s a bitch.
The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE.
My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been,
and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only
to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire,
but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let’s cook tonight,
those are for you, Stephen. You won’t come to me in my dreams,
so I must communicate by other avenues.
A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam”
—a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”—
and asks: Have you seen this? It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
If I have, I can’t remember, though I did visit
with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped
silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room
as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you
from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed,
not till we were released into the grand air we couldn’t touch and could.
You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes,
in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son.
Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS.
I’ve studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands.
Of course I would. Each finger, even.
To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of.
If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape.
Homer’s similes, I’ve been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war
and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor.
“Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms
and have satisfied my desire for grief”—this, my mind’s new refrain
in the pharmacy queue, in the train’s rattling frame.
The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert
“where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.”
It’s nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference:
The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire.
We see double.
You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is “Boats at Sea.” It’s like how sometimes I forget you’re gone.
But it’s not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you’re already dead.
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam’s ever?
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.
