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.