The Windows

Beside the bar, in a townhouse’s yard,
my brother lay on the lawn, more still than dead,
grass blades impressing his stubbly cheek.
The Buick, crooked in its space, yawned,
its doors open, the keys hanging inside.
When he called my wife rolled over hard
and when I rose I dressed as quietly as I could.
It was only the emergency brake.
I bent through the window and yanked it,
and the car flopped back, rocked,
bottles rolling on the floor,
their hollow chime a pre-dawn melody,
a shining tinkle, conversation in a bar.

One wheel shifted off the curb
with a rubber scrape. His shoulders curled
at the sound, and he rolled, hollered ‘Hey man.’
I stretched him to his feet, his smell
of smoke and bile and bar stronger than the air
of mulch and sweat still left in my clothes,
and we swayed toward my truck,
where pitchfork tines caught the light
and our next day’s load of mulch waited.

We must have cast slovenly shadows
under the amber parking lot lights,
and maybe they stretched over slanted porches
and crowded clotheslines, over the textured metal panels
that penned in balconies. Or maybe I thought they did.
Pushing the car into a space, I grunted
and it echoed among the buildings,
their windows hollow with those not watching.

The Day My Brother Almost Drowned

Afterward, we scraped castles out of the ground,
dribbling water and pond sand into spires,
leaning between our bony knees with the other boys,
we talked turrets, towers, the moat to drown invaders.
Gawky and goggled Carl, spindle thin and sniffly,
who looped an arm under my brother’s
and struggled toward the shore, Carl planted stick flags,
blinked at the long-haired men in sandals near the willows.
We knelt in the heated smell of cocoa butter and fish,
the buzz of deerflies that sent no one running
to the water that afternoon.

My brother didn’t scream.
He felt only the chill slither of water beneath stretched toes.
The cold must have run like a current through his guts.
He could only state ‘help,’ a clipped word,
and I heard him only because he did not scream,
did not pitch and screech like so many around us did,
like we did.

As Carl began to turn, my brother’s head tipped back just once
amid lovely water rings rolling, reflecting the sky.

Photo of My Farm House, 1915

Even in the kitchen, with all its bawdy steam,
icicles descend. In the window,
ice stresses spruce needles, chills them
to shards. The floor’s seams
whistle with cold passing below.

I work inside, my farm more icon
than the site of “true work,”—this
photo captures cold too cleanly,
the way the word work rests
too gently on its broad definition.

In 1915, a body warmed with all the work
in a day, moving through the wood chopping,
baking, feeding and cleaning. With a book I stare
out windows that have long sunk to blurs
at pane’s bottom. The wind rattles them at night.

I remember my own winter’s work, the wood
smell burning through the air, my hands
numb and red with the blood of movement.
I remember dashboards barking heat, a shovel’s
weight in my shoulders, cow backs matted with frost.

Pouched now in the quietest work of clean paper,
I forget tapping maples for food, breaking a trough’s
ice with an ax. I dwell in the warmer, easy
dormancy of a different time,
when cold no longer makes me move.