Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

My Brother’s Keeper

• 98 my brother’s keeper There’s a moment in my life I want to make love to my brother. I want to swim the torrential river between us and save his life. I want to put all my body around his drowning body. I want to pull him into me. We are in Vermont, our first time alone as adults. He has come all the way east across the continent rather than commit suicide. He’s lost his three babies and wife to his best friend. Nights he sleeps in his camper parked on the side lot beneath trees with leaves like meat turning color. Upstairs in bed with my love he is out there like he was when we were kids, on the porches because it is wrong for a brother to sleep in the same room as his sisters and our father when he comes home from the Army is jealous. To get him here I have raved about the beautiful college girls of the town. I didn’t understand then they were mostly Jewish and would not be drawn to a handsome blond cowboy, with Keep on Truckin’ taped in iridescence above San Diego plates. Mornings our bodies from the same bodies face each other in a high northern room over the Winooski, standing to sip our coffees and watch it ice over before our eyes. He tells me “the big secret,” the seven years they competed, both making • 99 love to her. “Someday I will win,” the best friend boasted in the beginning and now he has, and now my brother’s other confusion about how beautiful she was in his arms. I am dreaming of reaching across the ice and pulling my brother to me, to make the love I have for him actual flesh. The images float between us so real I know he must see them too, and so knows my cowardice, experiences again love’s betrayal. But I am struggling too to recover from the night with the man I love who in our high moments begs me to tell him I desire my brother, to go naked through the snow to my brother’s door. Every morning I hold my breath that my brother emerge from the igloo that is his bed. Our father went around the world to war and our baby brother took his place in Mama’s bed. We won but Daddy was never the same. My brother’s legs hurt and sometimes he forgot, sleepwalked sobbing back to her. Daddy’s yells woke us like nightmares, “Sissy!” “Mama’s boy!” Some mornings we woke to our mother on the porch curled around our brother in the crib. Now I am like the Nazis who placed the naked bodies of young Jewesses on their dying soldiers in the experiment a woman might bring them back to life. In that huge room at a window like Vermeer the white stuff starts falling around our two bodies of desert at flood stage, debris of the miraculous flesh our parents risked everything to make. Then I am like Isis combing all the world • 100 to put our mother’s son back together so mutilated by our other brother this is the origin of evil at the beginning of the world and I want to be a poet to say my brother the River and the distance between us. I want to die to say what a brother is, to name the river and be the love poem to the soldiers on both sides, our father to be for all time a line out into the Nile of his severed gonad inside the fish that’s swallowed it, rowing, Mama, past our more practical sister lying down with carrion on the battlefield my body grown dark as a Jew’s, the guns at our heads, the chambers of gas on every shore, the prisoners who know nothing now but the fuck, their mothers cribbed into evidence against them and lie down on the cold bronze my brother has become and suck him back ...