To
My Younger Brother at a Zen Monastery
We haven’t spoken since you moved to
Maine.
But I found this poem of mine from
middle school
while cleaning out the old attic. Thought
of you.
It’s about a bird. Back then, I called
it lame;
Do you think it will ever fly or sing?
We’d seen a bluebird from our bedroom
window
almost every day that April—wounded, darting
back and forth in a pool of roots and
rain.
Watching him, frantic, recalled your
voice: He got me!
from the time I closed the car door on your
thumb.
That breathless, staggered rhythm—
I don’t know why I laughed.
You were in pain. Was I
cruel, anxious, caught off guard?
You never made a peep. At the dentist
once,
the Novocaine faded and you accepted it
in silence.
Accepted I would always be the favorite.
After I read the poem in class, I
placed my ear on the cold
surface of the desk. It was like
talking long distance on our
old rotary phone: sharp and static,
broken full of emptiness.
Like laying my head on Dad’s chest
while he spoke,
just after his mother died. I was
seven.
He was stoic. Mom was mute and still.
You went upstairs alone.
You went upstairs alone.