[Image description: a poem by Elisa Gonzalez titled âAfter My Brotherâs Death, I Reflect on the Iliad,â published in the New Yorker on April 18, 2020. She won the 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writersâ Award and is working on her first book.
The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair.
The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I donât have the virus, itâs a bitch.
The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE.
My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been,
and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only
to the dead, someone tells meâto comfort, I assume, or inspire,
but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and letâs cook tonight,
those are for you, Stephen. You wonât come to me in my dreams,
so I must communicate by other avenues.
A friend sends an image from Cy Twomblyâs âFifty Days at Iliamâ
âa red bloom, the words âlike a fire that consumes all before itââ
and asks: Have you seen this? Itâs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
If I have, I canât remember, though I did visit
with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped
silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room
as guards jostled in, and Iâthough charged with keeping you
from troubleâjoined the game, and the whole time we never laughed,
not till we were released into the grand air we couldnât touch and could.
You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes,
in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son.
Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS.
Iâve studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands.
Of course I would. Each finger, even.
To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of.
If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape.
Homerâs similes, Iâve been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war
and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor.
âLet Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms
and have satisfied my desire for griefââthis, my mindâs new refrain
in the pharmacy queue, in the trainâs rattling frame.
The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert
âwhere a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.â
Itâs nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference:
The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire.
We see double.
You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is âBoats at Sea.â Itâs like how sometimes I forget youâre gone.
But itâs not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chasedâ
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know youâre already dead.
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priamâs ever?
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.
