Showing posts with label brothers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brothers. Show all posts
7/12/22
The Derelict - Sharon Olds
He passes me on the street, his hair
matted, skin polished with grime,
muttering, suit stained and stiffened—
and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a
sign of beauty and power. But his hands,
strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and
flap slightly as he walks, like hands of
someone who has had polio, hands
that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his
piss, I see the ingot of his beard,
and think of my younger brother, his beauty,
coinage and voltage of his beard, his life
he is not using, like a violinist whose
hands have been crushed so he cannot play—
I who was there at the crushing of his hands
and helped to crush them.
1/30/19
COLLECTING FUTURE LIVES - Stephen Dunn
Now that everybody was dead
only he and his brother knew
the blood secrets, the unequal
history each nervous system
keeps and rehearses
into a story, a life.
Over the years they’d agreed
to invent and remember
a long hum of good times,
love breaking through
during card games,
their father teaching them
to skip stones
under the Whitestone Bridge.
The smart liar in them
knew these stories
were for their children
who, that very moment
over dinner, were collecting
their future lives.
But sometimes
in their twice-a-year visits
late at night
when their wives had tired
of the old repetitions,
they’d bring up the silences
in the living room
after a voice had been raised,
father’s drinking, mother’s
long martyrdom before the gods
of propriety and common sense.
In their mannerisms
each could see the same ghosts.
And if they allowed themselves
to keep talking,
if they’d had enough to drink,
love would be all
that mattered, the love
they were cheated of
and the love they got,
the parental love
that if remembered at all
had been given, they decided,
and therefore could be given again.
9/7/16
BROTHER - Richard Shelton
you
still carry
your
guilt around for company
I
will not deprive you of it
but
I have an empty space
where
my hate lived
while
I nursed it
as
if it were a child
brother
my only
brother
it was too late for us
before
we were born
it
was too late
before
you learned to be brutal
and
I learned to be weak
your
childhood
was
a hallway of doors
each
closing just as you
got
to it
but
I was younger
and
all the doors were closed
before
I could walk
how
could I have expected you
to
save me when you could
not
save yourself
brother
my only
brother
if not from you
from
whom did I learn
so
much despair
I
went in search
of
a father and found you
with
a whip in your hand
but
what were you searching for
in
such dark places
where
I was searching for love
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