And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

Morituri

196 Morituri You don’t know what you love until you’ve lost it. —Federico Fellini 1 A man we loved is gone, a car he drove belongs to someone else, his house is up for sale, and we confront mortality each time we breathe. Reduced to tears by memory, we learn the lost are always with us. And so they are since love’s the legacy of loss and loss alone. What’s past lives on to prove the legacy will last. But where’s the clemency in that? Without the right to bid or pass, we’re picked to play the merciless poker of chance, and the cards, the cards keep coming, joker by joker. 2 It’s forty days to the day, and you’re not here. Last night I called your number by mistake 197 and heard your still recorded message . . .”You have reached . . .” It all came back—intensive care for days, one doctor who confirmed the truth, the nurses tending you as if you were their brother more than mine. And all you asked was, “Sam, help me, for Christ’s sake . . . I never wanted it to end like this.” And nothing else. The day was the Epiphany, surnamed Little Christmas. Monitors beside your bed recorded blood pressure, pulse, and every breath. Before we left for lunch, we said our hesitant goodbyes. You slept sedated, but the nurse assured us you could hear. The last to speak was Sam, who carried both our names as dearest his mother insisted and whom you loved the most. “Uncle Robert, we all love you, but now we’re leaving for a bite to eat, and if you have to go while we’re not here, it’s okay . . . we’ll understand.” He kissed your forehead twice, then held you in his arms. Ten seconds later you were gone, as if his words had given you permission. 198 Later he told me you parted your eyelids, and your eyes were blue, not brown as we had known them all your life. No one could account for that. 3 Some say the three worst things are losing a child, a mate or a brother or sister. Some say the order’s right, some say it’s wrong, but what’s the point? All losses to the losers stab alike because they’re all the worst. 4 You’re buried in the same plot with our uncle, our cousin, both grandparents, our young mother, and our great aunt who raised us when our mother died and made us what we were and are. In the end it came to family after all. By intuition or epiphany, you picked your gravesite decades in advance as if you somehow knew what none of us could know. Just weeks before you died, you said that death no longer scared you though 199 you feared it all your life. Later, we honored your bequests and sorted through your papers and effects. We learned you were the same in public as you were at home—but more so. What else is there to say except, “So long for now, dear Bob.” Since brothers are forever brothers, you’re here and elsewhere all the time for me exactly as you are and always were—but more so. For Robert George Hazo ...