X
X I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. Our parents did not want his name used publicly. —from an unnamed child’s banner in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The boatpond, broken off, looks back at the sky. I remember looking at you, X, this way, taking in your red hair, your eyes’ light, and I miss you so. I know, you are you, and real, standing there in the doorway, whether dead or whether living, real.—Then Y said, “Who will remember me three years after I die? What is there for my eye to read then?” The lamb should not have given his wool. He was so small. At the end, X, you were so small. Playing with a stone on your bedspread at the edge of the ocean. Spring and Its Flowers Then, Tell me your fantasies, you said. And I: OK; I’m lying in bed, asleep, a child, and you, you’re sitting in the rocker there, knitting, like a mother bear. And you: Can I be the one in the bed, too? And you in the chair there, knitting? That February you dreamed your old father said, Spring this year and its flowers will cost you eighteen thousand dollars. Waking up we wished we could have lived together in a green and blue walled garden forever . . . the river at wolf 183 ...
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