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FOR DANNY
Sliding down Amtrak's rails to the city
to see my brother, to see Danny.
He's dying.
This story
…too large to disentangle,
the life and death,
the him and me,
a Bronx-sized story,
not enough paper in the
world to write it down,
not enough terabytes
in Amazon's servers
to store it,
this thing is vast,
this relationship of brothers,
the immigrant grandparents
with their Old Country worlds,
our own little shtetl
by Van Cortlandt Park,
learning Yiddish in the shule,
in the same dreary ninth-building
basement,
the parents who worked
and who loved us,
the sculpture and poetry
that would arrive one day,
the books in the house,
with their familiar covers, also
members of the family.
Then the honoring of our generation's call to action
whatever the cost…
Mississippi
London
Soweto
Hanoi
Laos
places far from
the Grand Concourse
and subway stations
of our youth.
But hold it,
all that came later,
after the fighting the screaming
the laughing
in our small bedroom, the
fifteen years sleeping head to foot.
Oh way too much.
Please stop. It can't be disentangled.
Explanations? Don't bother.
Descriptions? Forget it.
Sophie, Huddy, Toughie, Auric, Truly.
Yes, there were dogs who
accompanied us,
who may have understood best,
understood the brother who
never stopped running,
because dogs know a living
thing can only be what it is,
true to its nature,
much like those
great tall-masted ships
propelled by winds
we can’t see,
built to cut through
storms, to undertake long
voyages in search
of lost hopes and
forgotten dreams.
A sailing ship must sail.
It is beautiful under sail
doing what it is meant
to do.
(Same for a writer,
same for a seeker of truth, for
a dissector of news)
Things get blown overboard,
get lost in the wake,
but still the ship
draws ever closer to
the long-sought
shore.
Through the fog,
maybe, just maybe
we see something,
a line, a shape, a shadow
...land ho!
And the ship?
Oh, the voyage is done.
It's on the rocks,
our brave, faithful
ship.
November 3, 2014