ictus

Lake Mendota, Wisconsin Have you said everything you were going to say about skin, Kevin? How about everything you were going to say about obscurity & loss? These are the things you know— There has been a key for every lock you’ve picked & when you picked the locks the keys lost all their weight. You know your name is tattooed in black letters on the asphalt of I-90 somewhere between Madison & Pittsburgh. You know wherever it is you are today is not where you were born & the girls to whom you give your number have no idea not a single ending in your life has been beautiful. When you see your father’s name on the Caller ID, a shot of whiskey spills suddenly inside you. For a time you were younger than your older brother, & the only reason you are older than him now is because you kept on living. You don’t know who the rowboat that is moored in the middle of the bay belongs to, but you know at night it dreams about the oars it lost to the mud at the bottom of the lake. You know there are things which are genetic & things which are learned & then, there are the things from which you will never be detached. This is what I’m trying to say: I miss my brother. I’ve missed him ever since that train wreck inside the tunnel of his vein, a tunnel which instead of openings had thick walls paved with light on either end. Once, he shoved me off a dinghy & when the propeller bloomed a wake over my head he called it my baptism. This is why my father concieved an imaginary son who writes better poems than I do. This is why I am so far from the place where I was born & why every morning when I shave I want to crawl into the angle of the mirror that most resembles childhood. I take it back: I have no idea what that rowboat dreams of. I don’t know the last wishes of those oars that sunk to the bottom of the lake, or even if there were any oars in the rowboat to begin with. I don’t know the size of the scar inside my father or how a chain link fence must have begun to rust around his heart. I don’t know what made my brother do it. But back to what I know: tonight there is a star in the sky for every period that has been forgotten by a suicide note. Because the phone would not stop ringing, I have locked myself out of my apartment & come to this pier to see how the waves cradle a dinghy to sleep. I don’t return my calls because I have learned the brief spittle of last kisses is always a kind of bleeding. I have grown into my brother’s Timberlands & when I walk on gravel I know he’s in the gaps between the pebbles. To die is to leave the keys inside the skin & lock yourself forever outside the body. Tonight this is what remains: a stationary keel, the unstirred petals of the propeller. Father, I don’t care if this is earned: I have just caught myself rehearsing your eulogy.