Poem: Lament

Lament

By Patrick T. Reardon

 

Take your fingers and

trace the sculpture skin

shards, broken bottles

embedded in wall cement

top. Thieve over and in

for treasure:

 

my brother,

untriumphed as he felt,

unprotected,

unblossomed.

 

In middle night, I miss

again high-altitude

Albuquerque basketball

shots, just a game. No

harm, no foul.

 

You need to picture my

brother raging at my

photograph poems,

stealing his soul,

speaking for him,

poking into the wound

he owned — none

written if, with his

fatal gun, he had not

tunneled his bullet through

my brain and heart and

liver in November snow

-rain on his final porch.

 

I am given flyers for move-

on loss lectures I do not

want to attend. I’ll stay

here where my brother is

half alive still. Where I am

alive and know my shots

didn’t fall and we lost, but

survived to attend the

museum salsa concert with

all the loose-hip dances,

all the sheen forehead

smiles. I swim survival.

 

No floating for my brother

and me amid rocks,

rapids of poems. Swim

at own risk.

 

There is nothing to be

done in the calculus of the

game but to run, sweated,

wearied, behind the arc

and shoot another three

that clanks off the rim at

an odd angle to the other

team, the winning team.

He loved a uniform.

 

The back door clenched

shut behind my brother as

he stood wobbly behind his

house and raised the metal.

 

At the baby shower in the

brewery, he would have

asked for milk glass and had

no place to sit and left early.

 

He would have scrunched

his neck as I do from

some childhood muscle

memory, the way others

smile as they baby-learned

or dance or let their

hips swing loose just

walking a corridor or

a tunnel.

 

Outside the museum, the

carved head of a giant,

unembodied, eyes in bleak

black stone to uninterrupted

blue high-altitude evening

sky, unsettled and unsettling,

head and sky both, as my

brother and I were, and I

remain.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

 

This poem was originally published in After Hours magazine and later was included in my 2023 book from in case of emergency press, Let the Baby Sleep.