AN ACUTE ABSENCE OF WEATHER

( for my little brother Brian )

tomorrow arrived too late
to save you
you had become

the past tense
no longer present at your own life
time had abandoned you

the world turning its back
on the sun
staring into the night

a darkness
without stars
the far away barking of dogs

a somewhere
that's nowhere
where even the weathervane

doesn't know which way to turn
the acute absence
of weather

*

Because of his stature in the world and his skill at making his way through its faults and falls...he had become the BIG BROTHER simply because of who he was. Only now in death does he once more become my little brother. I became a mere meddler with words...a peddler of poems.

When he was truly my little brother he once asked me one of those childlike questions that adults or even slightly big brothers find impossible to answer.

Lost in himself he asked of me" "Is there weather when you die?" I didn't know how to answer it then or...now.

On the great barn that was his shed he had placed a weather vane and we still look at it to this day as it searches for the answer to this question.

I had told him then that: "Whatever...there would be weather."

I suppose he could now answer his 7-year-old-self's strange little question.