Wind with no father, and father to no one,
bless my brother who hanged himself from an oak by the pond
the summer my song split in two –
the one of me who hid from the blacks of his eyes
and the one of me who wanted nothing more
than to touch them as the fir cones dropped,
as we batted sticks at thistle tops in August
to ignite the fields with their sparks.
He was the boy, you remember, who always
wanted a tail, not so much for balance in falling
as the bloom of falling itself,
tail over head, head over hands, until the ground of some town
would kiss him. Any town but our father’s.
As this one had: the hemlocks nesting
the oak, the oak nesting the boy and the shredded notes
of robins hanging from his fingers as the sun fell,
and you whistled and blew inside windows flung open,
the ghosts of gone bucks listening from the porches,
towards a man and the son he touches, towards a boy who is
more than spring, more even than my brother’s
laughter white like birch bark,
towards my boy on his tricycle among men with chainsaws;
men of cordwood breaking ground together,
and bread, their troubles fed to the fires,
the leaves flaming behind him as you bear him away.