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...

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 com...

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 ...

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                           ...

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                                                          ...

Seed Potato: Novena: Day Three We’re trying to decipher our scars.  Do we exist?  Yes.                                                                                                 Juan Felipe Herrera                                                 ...

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 o...

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 d...

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 a...

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 on...

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 wa...

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 ...