little brother

The Mile: Good Friday You will come at a turning of the trail to a wall of flame                                                 Anita Barrows                                                 “Questo Muro” It started in the garden didn’t it, (though maybe earlier) when he’s begging his father for his life only to be resolved to losing it after all. And all the blood means nothing.  It will fall onto the ground and the olive roots may tingle a bit and honestly be the only things that know what’s remarkable about all that’s going on here: a kiss is still waiting on the lips of the man who will rat him out. Honestly, it’s still being shaped, all that money hasn’t even changed hands.  And the rest of them are still asleep and he means to sleep with them, like he will tomorrow but with thieves.  He hasn’t even considered the real possibility of it all being some big mistake, not really, something that can, just by his asking,

Promise: Novena Day Six On rainy days we’d mostly play inside and upstairs though it was often enough she said get out of my hair and sight and we’d tighten up the fort and eat green apples until one of us (usually you because I hated taking it to the woods to dump anything I had to squat for) ran over that hill she’s buried on now and found some shade and far enough away the smell didn’t waft and wind-sway back into our faces.  And on days her hair was back in a bandana, maybe making bread, she’d need us, or me at least, to pound the air out roll after roll of fttt, ftttt, ftttttpt until it would go all out flat and then, neat as a clean diaper and quiet pin, rolled in a loaf all tucked in, and if the heat was right it would rise high so one piece was really two pieces if you cut it in half and when I was done and the air was out of the room, and the pan greased and especially the corners, I’d come fi

I’m sorry. The Savior has been delayed. Won’t you take a seat? Novena: Day Five                 The seasonless river lays hand and handiwork upon the world, obedient to a greater Mind, whole past holding or beholding, in whose flexing signature all the dooms assemble and become the lives of things.                                                 Wendell Berry                                                 The River Bridged and Forgot All summer, all the fall and through most of the winter you and me and a few of our friends from down the road or across the street would tramp up and down that hill and into the old wood’s road and make kid camps with sticks and pine branches and one time an old Army blanket and hassock that I bet is still there, what has it been? forty years?  And I wonder how is it you or I haven’t arrived shriven to this place and you and me  nearly fifty?  I’d like a warm cup of tea ple

where the hawk where the prey On Purity: Novena Day Five I cut / / / / / / I multiply everyday images.  I apply an aluminum point. To the landscape. To the sentence. To the photo. To the figure. To the word. And suddenly with a slight tremor of eyes, vertebrae and finders I destroy everything that exists.                                                                                 Juan Felipe Herrera                                                                                 Grafik You’ve never said though that doesn’t mean not ever not at all that it didn’t happen to you too that a man raised his hand to your face but not your face first your shoulder probably, brotherly in the weight of it, brotherly in the way it lifted and was able to what you’d taken to him that day and not by any way that was obvious as the rats who lived in our cellar were obvious                                                 (and you eve

Afraid Novena: Day Four Did I believe I had a clear mind? It was like the water of a river flowing shallow over the ice.  And now that the rising water has broken the ice, I see what I thought was the light is part of the dark.                                                                 Wendell Berry                                                                    Breaking It’s natural right?  It’s absolutely natural for kids to be afraid of the dark.  Right?  To be tucked under the warm scratch of the Army wool and go into (shallow or deep depending on who’s been drinking) a dream or at least asleep away from being afraid in the light because that isn’t natural or even allowed, (being afraid in the light) and only tolerated in the way shitting in a public restroom is tolerated, all ridicule and pee- ewe.  It’s the fragrance of shame and doesn’t it dog me all the way into the day.  But what in day fades an

Seed Potato: Novena: Day Three We’re trying to decipher our scars.  Do we exist?  Yes.                                                                                                 Juan Felipe Herrera                                                                                                 Nuclear Green Light The children with their dirty hands, they cup the split seed                 potato and cast it                 like a spell                 into the furrow.  Face up                 it is a moon cooling to its own                  burial in the ground, the brown                 and broken rocky ground.  Face down                 it is Quasimodo on his bell, deaf                 to every sound feel of even                 the wind, but it’s in his face                 while he sways and maybe the rain                 is made today just for him                 exclusive, and for it he’ll sit                 still    

Novena: Day Two Oh Jesus, who has said “Heaven and earth shall pass away but my word shall not pass away,” through the intercession of Mary Our Most Holy Mother I feel confident my prayer will be granted.                                                  Infant Jesus of Prague Novena Prayer Maybe it wasn’t the same day I came to look at you through the slats in the crib and how it seemed like you were laying there in a cage but near enough the same that you still hadn’t been carried upstairs to the spare room close to being tended if you cried (and for years I tried to measure why you were that far away and maybe it was because babies cry and make men shake if they’ve been away days and days on a job or a bender) and it happened you were calm asleep and in the shadow of the Infant of Prague, a stone statue my mother brought with her, a gift from her Irish grandmother.  Behind me while I stared at you my sister was flicking our

Trout We’ll get away I wonder who knows the way? The sun will come down from its pulpit with its red                                 red                                                 red                                                                 cassock slowly dissolving over the boulevard with its open heart.                                                                                 Juan Felipo Herrera                                                                                 Exile Boulevard But we weren’t clever enough to go together were we, out of that place.  We waited and maybe the first ten to twelve years, though we never really left one another, we never really strayed entirely together.  Even when  you count the long walks picking up rocks we’d throw back into the water (remember sometimes we’d stuff our pockets and walk down to low tide just to throw them in?) or trout fishing, all t

sundial Fruitlands Museum Harvard, MA New Baby: Cesarean Novena: Day One It’s later that we’d come to know how sick she was and from the place they cut you and the end of what remained that today I imagine as the severed head of the Hydra, and how once lopped and soft in the tray the head itself lay still but in its place something crimson grew and chewed its way through the burned ends of her tubes and scratched at where the uterus was and against the feminine blood and up into the colon.  But that would be years making itself and when you were brand new and nothing was said of you except here’s your brother they put our mother to bed sicker than they knew, bleeding and bleeding rot and exhaustion. It stole from you (though none of us knew her that either either, but for different reasons) those days she may have lain close to you, those days she may have held you, those days you didn’t have to cry and c

Green Point, West Quoddy Head, Lubec, Maine At Nine, and Just Past Six It must’ve been you were seven or not quite and so I was nine and we were together most of the time but this time it was the end of blueberry season and the cases and cases of beer waited on the backs of trucks and we took one each but really I was alone I don’t know where you’d got to or if you were even there that day I think maybe you’d stayed home with a sunburn because yesterday you’d forgotten your hat and Dad was in a different field than us and we’d switch off raking and sitting raking and sitting out the glances of ridicule from the old-timers the men and women who took their vacation time into the blueberry fields and made enough money to give their kids school clothes.  But you, too young to notice or even care, picked up rocks and put them in  your pockets to lay on the window sill in your room how different they were than the ones at the

Off-Wagon the solitude of my hands                 the secret of my arms                                                 Juan Felipe Herrara                                                 “The Secret of My Arms” Tucked up under the coat sleeves when the shovel is offered and then refused, I see the wrinkles along the wrist-cuff to the elbow and then the stain—which at first was a shadow which before that was the fat from the frying pan thrown not quite cool into the air and space (your face) between you and her and it was the first food you’d kept down and quiet about for days and the places you came from stayed hidden in your left breast pocket, buttoned, worried with dirt from your thumb while you were on your way to me wondering if I’d shut you out and it’s the burn I want to tend today for you, the worm of it pimpled and picked at and it’s the lips I want to salve, the puss and r

lock The Codman Estate Harvard, MA Name Calling Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near us.  This is why the experience of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human.                                 Primo Levi                                 If This Is Man When I think about you and the trouble we caused the spot on the back of my head heats up, announcing its misconduct, it spikes like a fever, it flushes me out of the bushes where I’ve kept that protecting you hand-in-hand memory safe, safe, as a time capsule and sealed.  Imagine it  coming undone like a rash spreading up  your neck, coiling from the breast because that’s where it all starts for me, behind the flabby fat, behind the scratched at bone (but scratched at from behind the rib wall) because it’s muscle we got to burn through, and tendon.  And there's as much spilled blood as we can spi