They have always been among us,
Preening and parading through their brief tenure,
Those acolytes of taking their final bows
While safely in their prime,
Ensuring the photos and screen-shots
Scattered on walls and tables
At their memorial service
Are the remnants of an eternal if truncated youth.
I would (having passed such a time anyway)
Demur to embrace such a notion,
As such an exit strikes me as the final half-measure
In an existence comprised of nothing but,
The process of having left hearts a-flutter,
Cleaved in half yet never made whole,
The tales suitable for guffaws and back-slaps,
But invariably involving merely one protagonist.
I have looked in the mirror, and wanly recognized
The lined face, the thinning and graying patch
Topping that sad apparition,
And I have resigned myself to the notion
That, when I am a thing of the past tense,
My remembrance will be in quieter tones,
The attendees with faulty aortas and rebuilt hips of their own,
And though the anecdotes about my final years
Will be short on notoriety and things
Not subject to the statutes of limitations,
Let it be remembered that I not only loved,
But lived that love as the contented part of a whole,
And that, though those days were not raucous
Nor involved more than one end of a candle aflame,
That I squeezed every **** last bit
Of all that time and tide had allotted.

Life its ownself is powerful fond of the long goodbye,
The process of moving from indispensable to incidental
An incremental trip of infinitesimal steps,
But the upshot is goodbye all the same,
And once upon a time everywhere was a warm and intimate place,
A universe of mobiles and appliqué on the walls,
Somewhere where you were all the comfort and confidante ever needed,
But the world went and got bigger
And though you thought you’d stayed the same,
Fidelity being your stock in trade, you’d become a lesser thing,
Privy to the grim notion
That affection can be genuine and expendable all at once,
And now you are outbound,
Gingerly ******* a coach-class ticket
To an uncertain destination,
And you suppose all things are possible now,
But that is all part and parcel of the cold realm of the probable,
And you rest the ticket in your lap, just to the left of the heart
That is hand-stitched on your rustic gingham
(The patch a bit faded and Hershey-stained now,
And one or two of the stitches are not as tight as they should be)
Which you suppose still beats, but only faintly enough
To be just a sad and mocking thing.

It would be fanciful to believe she wrote the odd couplet
In between exchanging gunfire with some state trooper,
Or knocked off a couple quick stanzas
While hotly pursued by some city police roadster,
Siren wailing and sidewalls straining.
Most likely, they were the product of the down times,
The doldrums between bank jobs,
A time to patch wounds and grab the odd forty winks,
Time given to reflecting upon what had transpired,
More likely that which lurked in some indeterminate future.

As to what lay between the covers
Of those dime-store notebooks
(One wonders how they were procured,
By coins fished from the bottom of some threadbare purse,
Or taken gratis, either brazenly or on the sly)
Their consideration has devolved
Into the love child of curiosity and notoriety,
To be imitated by devotees of her brief romp through history
Or sniffed at by the theses-laden as mere juvenilia,
Though they may grant her a certain if tentative feel for rhyme,
Perhaps acknowledge a joie de vivre in her lines,
But if one reads and perhaps reads again,
Something else comes forth,
A thing which some might argue marks the true poetess,
A rendering of the realization that one's life
Can be full or failure at twenty-three or eighty-three
And that the interval between the two
May or may not be preferable
To the brief flash of light, the brief yet excruciating sting
Which precedes the grim darkness.

The saving grace of unconventional beliefs
Is that they are usually held closely to one's chest,
Like a poker hand whose possessor
Cannot determine if it is advisable to bluff
Or simply fold and sacrifice the ante
But such reticence is an afterthought
Come the evening's third or fourth Buddy long-neck,
At which time restraint becomes a weakness,
A refuge for losers, and so one of his compatriots
Feels sufficiently emboldened (if not ennobled)
To lecture his fellow stool-mates
On the absurdity, indeed the very impossibility
Of the existence of some higher power,
Some sky-residing guiding principle,
How the whole house of cards
Tottered upon the rickety scaffolding of givens and assumptions
(Reminding him that his negation
Was dependent on a box set of if-then statements
Simply a fool's errand, as he was fully in the grip of mania,
Possessed by the bedrock of his faithlessness)
Not dissuaded by the bartender's admonishing
For chrissakes, Philly, maybe it's time for you to call it a night,
Mebbe go somewhere to tell some kids
There ain't no Santa Claus
So he decided to take his leave instead,
Nodding to those who chose to remain
For the graduate-level portion of Philly's lecture
As he stepped into the street to regard the calm nighttime,
Just the shaving of a crescent moon in the sky,
Hidden now and again by the passing clouds
Dotting and dashing the sky like some unknown cipher
And he considered the notion that all of this
Was the product of some random jumble,
Some rudderless happy accident,
But as he muddled upon the idea further,
He'd thought upon his own voyage
Undertaken with little aforethought to manning the tiller,
And, being all too familiar with the dreck and dross
Of letting things fall where they may,
He was unable to reconcile himself
To all of this being the upshot of happenstance.

It is an undertaking to be done with some trepidation,
As the arrival of June-like warmth and sunshine
Can lead us to an unwise giddiness,
A disregard for what we instinctually know
Concerning the introduction of basil and succulents
While the spectre of an unwelcome late-season freeze
Lurks some days westward in Calgary or Winnipeg,
But this is mostly the grunt work
One puts in for preparation for summer's bounty,
The shoveling and hoeing and grunting
Which one performs with pro forma grunting and *******
There is a certain reflexive restoration in this task
Which belies our outward irritation
And though we cast the odd sideways glance
Toward the shadows at the back of the lot
Where rabbits and chipmunks
And other less tangible potential enemies lie in wait
There is a warmth which permeates marrow and memory,
A thing which recalls a child running
Through torrents of October leaves
Or sitting wordlessly with a loved one on the porch
Or any number of tableaus from this thing
Of worry and wonder.

In his reveries, there is no furtive glancing around corners,
No skulking and scraping to hide from scowling gendarmes.
He is huge, *******, a proto-Kong of the wrong side of the tracks,
(Indeed, more than that—beyond the corporeal,
Something elemental, Master of Nature’s laws
Yet subservient to none of them)
Strutting down the boulevards and byways,
Marching through the very midst of graveside services,
Feasting on the floral tributes,
Fornicating with the freshly dug earth.
And he races onward, unconstrained and uncontrollable,
Forcing himself upon matchstick girl and street urchin,
Misusing them in horrible, unspeakable ways,
(His appetites creatures unto themselves,
Not subject by the boundaries of propriety or biology)
Taking for himself their sad collections of pennies,
Tossing them heavenward to rain down in a copper cacophony
Before he steals upon an unsuspecting bobby,
Slitting his throat and setting the corpse afire,
Proceeding then to urinate upon the ashes.
As these tableaus unfold in the nickelodeon of his sleep
(Not accompanied by some tinkling version of Hurry No. 26
Jangling uncertainly on some hayseed the-ay-ter untuned upright
But rather by some Dada-esque concoction
Bereft of consistent key or time signature)
He laughs unrestrainedly, bereft of cause or context
Without a trace of mirth or simple humanity.

He'd made what he'd believed the requisite sacrifices,
At least mildly painful but fully necessary,
Striving to keep a certain arm's-length objectivity
In order to carry out his craft
So that it was not tainted by sentiment,
Detachment serving as antiseptic,
In the hopes divining the purposes of God or whatever,
And thus giving it the proper exposition,
So he'd set about the process of finding some celestial thread,
Traipsing both interstate and back road,
Standing forlornly before crumbling Catskill hotels,
Abandoned bath-houses and resorts in Sharon Springs,
The sarcophagus-like state office building in Binghamton
(Hopelessly poisoned before it could ever be occupied,
Casting a baleful shadow over the city's ragged downtown)
The remnants of the Strand over in Ithaca,
Once beautiful lady of vaudeville
Now nesting-place-***-latrine for pigeons
Cooing and trilling at him insistently,
As if they spoke some code he must be able to cipher,
The sprawling auto graveyard
Cradled in the elbow-crook of an on-ramp in Cortland,
The black-eye front ends of ancient Buicks and Datsuns
A series of inscrutable crossword puzzle rows,
All of these things whispering intermittently to him
But providing no revelation, save a gut feeling
That the epiphany he sought was forever beyond him,
And in the mad act of a man beyond dejection,
He pulled his car into some sad rest area,
No more than a picnic table and a port-a-john,
Wandering over to the edge of the scrubby woods
Where teens fornicated and drunks urinated,
And pulled up a fistful of ragged flowering weeds
Pulling of the petals one by one
In the manner of some sad, jilted, loved-then-unloved juvenile
Contemplating how deeply he dwells among the forsaken.

We are all machines that eventually show wear;
Here and there a spring will sag, the odd stitch will tear.
The imprudent man tries to restore the defaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

Do not try to scold us, or hold us in contempt;
We will not be trained beasts--it’s unwise to attempt
To make us jump through hoops or perform somersaults
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

It’s unwise to ignore me, or choose to consult
Someone who thinks otherwise—I’ve seen the result!
The odd homicide, the occasional assaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

If you value hearth and home, you listen to me.
(Ignore at your peril—only advice is free.)
The moral of our tale resides in morgues and vaults.
(The perfect love song is a listing of your faults.)

These gatherings had become somewhat regular,
A short drive for most involved,
Having stayed behind once the mill closed
(There were the odd out-of-state license plates,
Mostly Florida and the Carolinas,
The vehicles' occupants sporting incongruous tans,
And they were treated with a certain reserve,
As if they had breached some faith,
Had broken some covenant)
And they were invariably in the morning,
Leading more than one wag to note
Well, at least we're all on first shift now.
And the talk outside of Wiegert's,
Shambling old funeral home a little more care-worn
With each generation of the family it fell to,
Turned to such things as Butchie's unusual good luck,
How he'd remained more or less unscathed by the mill,
Losing only the tip of a pinkie finger in a roller
(It was said that, back before the dining room
At the Montmorenci House
Had been converted into a tattoo studio,
You always shook hands with the left and right
To ensure a full set of ten fingers in the grip.)
And how he had, even though he was among
The most reticent of men, been a regular
At the retiree luncheons at the diner up in Wilcox
(The timing of such events subject to certain vagaries
As an infrequent February snow storm
Or the less uncommon changes in ownership)
And how he once explained his presence,
And then only when pressed,
By quietly noting Well, I figger my will-be's
To be a solitary thing, and the only folks
I share my used-ta-be's is all of you good people.

It has been long since decommissioned and closed to traffic,
The borough choosing not to replace it,
Simply dead-ending the road at its foot,
And most of the populace, casting a wary eye
Upon the crumbling, moss-dappled abutments,
Deign it unwise to walk upon it as well.
He is there most every day,
Regardless of, and perhaps oblivious to,
The meteorological particulars of the moment,
January no different from June or November.
He is, on the odd occasion,
Not the sole visitor to the clanking anachronism:
There are children whom he regards
With a grandfatherly solicitude
Or a well-practiced gruff wariness,
Depending on the age and attitude of the cherub in question,
Young lovers treated with a studious indifference,
Allowing them time and space to trod their well-worn paths,
The occasional generational fellow-traveler,
Stopping by for a brief and mutually proscribed interval,
Each knowing one does not come to such places
For indeterminate and interminable idle chit-chat,
And in any case, they would know there things to be considered,
As he has married and buried,
Has celebrated his muted victories, mourned his plebeian losses,
Accepted his compromises and allowances,
And sometimes he will note the small plaque on one beam,
Noting the bridge's origin in New York's Finger Lakes,
Where benign glaciers made burbling inlets
Emptying into lakes which end up nowhere,
And he will find an odd comfort in the notion
That the sluggish brown old creek flows into the Clarion,
And thence to the Allegheny and Ohio
Likewise the Mississippi and onward to the ocean,
Part and parcel of all things once and forever, amen.

There is always the fire,
Whether in the charcoal sketches
Or the scattered canvases, each shunted off to the side
In various states of incompletion
(He offered little clue as to why each was seemingly abandoned,
As he seemed reasonably content with them
In terms of composition and technique,
Suggesting there was something else that eluded him,
Something he had misapprehended)
An all-encompassing conflagration
Which promised the eventual envelopment
Of all in its path, flesh and façade,
Mortar and muscle,
Yet the assemblage of waiters, telephone operators,
Delivery boys and meter maids
Do not, by and large, exhibit the expected terror;
Oh, it is there now and again,
Mixed in among those who would,
With a certain madness in their gaze,
Exhort the torch-bearers onward,
And there is the odd face who regard the whole undertaking
With an unmistakable glee,
But, by and large, there is a matter-of-factness about the figures,
Varying between grim determination and an utter sang-froid,
And when one of the select few he has showed the preliminaries
Noted how he'd expected the dried brush and ground cover
To burst into flame on a more-or-less daily basis,
He looked up from his pencils and grunted
When it comes, the brush won't have a ******* thing
To do with it.

An old boy named Billy Joe Clyde
Took hisself a lovely young bride
But he had several vices
Plus herbs and secret spices
And ate the lass Kentucky fried.

The place seems somewhat less imposing,
The healing effects of time a beneficence
Denied to wood, metal, and stone
(The high towers bent or fallen,
The chain-link and barbed-wire of the fences
Rusted, unsuitable, merely vestigial)
But it maintains a force, a malevolence
In spite of a certain dilapidation,
Though its physical condition no more than a passing concern
For those who have returned,
As they have matters of a less corporeal nature
Which necessitates a reappearance at such a place:
Some have come in penance for transgressions,
Be they real or imagined,
Some have come to mourn,
For while there are any number of monuments and museums,
There is a dearth of gravesites.
While some have come simply because they continue to be,
Their very presence, their simple act of survival
The essence of testimony.

It stood on a mound, prepossessing in its own right,
But the height of the grim, unadorned steeple
And the tableau it cast when storms would roll in
From the cold gray waters of Lake Erie
Was somewhat intimidating to small children
And others predisposed to being dominated,
Though what awaited one within
Could be equally intimidating, if no more so;
Oh, there was the nod to brotherly love
And coming to God with a joyful noise,
But the occupants of the pulpit
(Invariably square-jawed, gray-maned older men
Whose visages were brewing maelstroms,
Incipient cloudbursts on the very precipice
Of drenching the insufficiently pious)
Left no doubt as to the serious of their mission,
And were equally up front as to the cataclysm
Which would rain down on the congregation,
The mills, the town and all those
Who proved insufficient in their piety,
And while there were questions
Concerning prescience and cause-and-effect,
Most of what they threatened came to be
(The Montmorenci Company shuttered and silent,
A sad procession of U-Hauls, all on one-way rentals
Tottering out of town after the muted goodbyes)
Though, as an unintended and unforeseen consequence,
Taking the church as well, its grounds now only visited
By mothers and small children
Clambering upon the playground equipment
The church begrudgingly installed
Shortly before it closed its doors for good,
And when the gunboat-gray clouds
Rolled on down from up near Buffalo,
They would hurry on home
As the droplets, relative leviathans
Slapping on the pavement as they scurried home,
Came at increasingly frequent intervals,
And though they could hear the rumbles of thunder
Grumbling with a certain portent as the storm moved closer,
Their procession, though quite brisk,
Was more unless unworried,
The adults knowing full well the downpours
Were merely succor upon the carrots and gardenias.

It was an unornamented, workaday kind of place,
The type of hand-to-mouth concern
Scattered all through these not particularly grand towns
Tethered onto the old Grand Army Highway,
(Each interruption in the amalgamation
Of tight turns and gently stoop-shouldered hills
More or less the same, the only variation being
The extent to which the main drag was not what it once was)
A collection of the detritus and left-behinds
Of a place a comfortable preponderance of its denizens
Had found it prudent to leave in the rear-view mirror
Though the contents wherein more of a regional nature,
Old Duquesne beer signs and Penn State football programs,
Souvenirs such as Adelphia Cable jackets
Or 1954 Guaranty Paper calendars
Too painful or too precious to be put up for sale,
The edifice itself a gerrymandered concern,
Rooms created from dividers and acoustic wall panels
Yet unable to hide its giant single-room past
As some small manufacturing concern,
A machine shop or ancient tannery,
Telltale signs of ancient and abruptly capped plumbing
Incongruous fuse boxes and gas connections
Peeking out unobtrusively here and there.
We’d picked out a couple of bits and bobs,
Haggled respectfully but not aggressively
And swung the car back onto the main road
Heading west to Port Allegany,
Hoping to catch breakfast at a diner whose Yelp reviews
Lauded the quality of its corned beef hash,
Though we found the place shut tight,
A sign hopefully noting Temporarily Closed for Renovations
Yellow-taped and fading stuck fast to the front door.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then,
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

It was late April, or perhaps early May
At the Home for Blind Children
(This was all some time ago,
When one's infirmities were spelled out quite bluntly)
And the children, being set loose
In the resolute glow of the maybe-Spring-is-here sunshine,
Were playing baseball on a diamond-ish field
Wrestled from the goldenrod and crownvetch
Through eminent domain.
Oh, the ball was large, and beeped away like Sputnik,
But it was clearly the game of Cobb and Ruth and Mantle
Just the same, the proceedings ambling on as per usual,
The kids at the plate fixing on the wobbly, blaring orb
Just in time to nick it with their bats
And, with proper and judicious direction,
Traipse around the bases in accordance with the law
As laid down by Abner Doubleday himself.
One of the children, however, inexplicably locked onto the ball
From the moment it left the pitcher's hand,
Driving it in a high arc past the fielders
And over the chain-link boundary
Which had been put up for the Little League teams
A couple of years ago.
Strangely enough, both sighted spotters
Had picked that exact moment to be miles away
From the action taking place on the field,
Perhaps distracted by an unusual bird song,
Possibly formulating plans for their day off,
Maybe even contemplating love yet to be
(It was Spring, after all)
And thus never saw the flight of the ball
As it took flight toward its unlikely landing place.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon,
The sightless and those with varying degrees of vision,
In a fruitless search in the high grass at the edge of the field
And just outside of the foul lines,
Never imagining to look outside of the fence,
As all the while a small herd of cows in an adjacent field
Stared at them impassively,
Occasionally pausing to nibble on the patchy grass and clover
In the exact spots they had grazed the day before

It had been, indeed almost constantly so,
Spotted and dotted with the odd bit of graffiti:
Hastily spray-painted citing of some school’s graduating class,
Irregularly shaped hearts bearing initials of couples
Whose undying fealty would not last the summer,
The odd cartoon figure, its subject occasionally discernible
But what had appeared
Upon the old Buffalo-and-Boston railroad bridge
Was a different animal altogether,
Painstakingly crafted brushstrokes
Crossing t’s and gently rounding o’s,
The entire length spanning Route 20
Marked with a simple admonition—Just Love.
The DOT crew, adequately supplied
With power washers and gray paint
And sufficiently featherbedded with summer help,
Sauntered in after the weekend to restore the overpass
To something akin to pristine condition,
But one of the summer kids
(An accounting major from the state school over in Cobleskill,
Probably knew who’d written this in the first place)
Hesitated before pulling the trigger on a sprayer.
Boss, he grumbled, it just don’t feel right blasting this off.
The foreman sighed (his disdain for the temp help
Bordering on downright mania most days)
I feel ya, kid, but the time to love yer fellow man
Is all off the clock.

And so we offer what we shall,
Sometimes in tune with the season
For those of us of the Christmas-and-Easter-visit-to-the-pews set,
Sometimes in the seeking of some benediction,
Other times for things less tangible,
A certain haunting or hunger not subject to definition.
They are, by their natures and ours,
Unremarkable things of humdrum origin,
For we are not of that stratum
Where our munificence is duly noted
With testimonial dinners or staid brick campus buildings
Bearing our patronymic on some plaque,
For we are but the most minor of the magi,
Our alms likely to thump wanly
At the bottom of small cardboard box
Or rattle thinly on some plate,
And we can only hope that we are judged
With an emphasis on intent over content.

He’d never met the old man, of course,
As he’d put haylofts and horseshit behind him
Faster than a body could say “Jack Robinson”,
Though he’d met the son when he’d come through
For a quick hello-and-how’m-I-doing back in sixty-five or sixty-six
(I’d asked him, he’d often say while sharing a laugh with himself,
If the ‘A’ in Nelson A. stood for ’A ******* heap of money.')
No one from that branch of the family comes around anymore,
(It being unlikely they could find the place on a map,
Even one of the few which nodded toward its existence)
Having long since given up on the land in general
And, most certainly, this piece in particular,
Though he carriers the banner for the patronymic
In the ancestral family environs
(The surname, once universally known and,
Depending on one’s outlook,
Revered or reviled, now an anachronistic footnote,
Consigned to a black-and-white era
Like so many I Love Lucy re-runs)
Living in the front rooms of what passes for a house on Bowery Lane,
And he will, all too close to invariably for those old-timers
Who gather at the compact little diner at the four corners
(Its life blood dependent on parents dropping off their progeny
At the tony schools over in Ithaca, the regulars passing the time
In mock argument over which one of them
Actually owns the BMW with Connecticut plates)
All but cackle Boys, I’d gladly pick up the tab today,
But the lawyers are still hagglin’ over my part of the inheritance,
And once he has finished the final refill of coffee,
He slowly negotiates his way out of his chair and heads out,
The gravelly shoulder of the highway all too noticeable
Through the thinning soles of his secondhand boots.

That thing of varied tangibility,
Be it the West or the frontier or whatever,
Has long since gone a-gleaming,
The time when it was still proper
To pay ones respects
Having passed beyond memory itself,
Those phenomena so elemental,
So deeply interwoven in our days and fates
They were bestowed monickers of their own
Now simple chemical reactions and natural curiosities
Familiar and easily explicable,
Yet as we apprehend those still, starlit skies
Which engendered such wonder in our forebearers,
Our understanding of the heavens
Has not left us any less lonely or forsaken
Than those sad men on horseback
Who whispered a name plaintively into the zephyr.

Consider, if you will, the fullness of all
Which Nature has made, seemingly infinite in variety
Its endless permutations randomly arrayed
In such a manner that science and piety
Would concur that its bounty is to be enjoyed
For nothing more than its boundless, lovely inscrutability
Yet its works exhibit a consistency
To be employed in the service of mankind,
A felicitous though unacknowledged design
Enabling the manufacture of such potions,
Such poultices designed to bend the wills of men
As they are, regrettably, such malleable, lightweight notions,
Not given to steadfastness or certainty of action
The upshot of which sadly proved beyond my ken,
A final, fatal blunder, a failing to sufficiently consider
That man lacks the stability of the simple hyacinth
And what he has created, God shall put asunder.

If anyone should ask who I was after I have left this place,
You’ll likely come up with the most self-effacing lie
Convenient to you at that particular moment,
For I was perceived to be an accessory to your greatest mortification,
As such, I could never be more than just a what-may-have-been,
A reminder of a lifetime unfulfilled, unrealized.
Your brother was simply a name to me,
A dimly remembered face
Among any number of names and faces;
But you, oh, you were every word I’d ever sung or spoken,
And I knew every subtle rise and dip in the bridge of your nose,
The shoreline of your eyes, every shade of shadow
The sun cast upon your face.
I could not be what your brother imagined or prayed I was,
What, in fact, you are to me, thus ensuring
I would always be, in some sense, in some sunken corner of your mind,
A broken promise to that broken boy,
A sum destined forever to be in arrears.

Death is most charitable when it is final,
Once the defeated remains of the dearly departed
Have been neatly packaged, the papers filed,
The period placed on the end of the sentence,
For too often it rolls incessantly down the years,
Its effects no less corrosive, its whys and wherefores as insubstantial
As the air that sad boy kicked at in those final moments.
No service for us, then, no “closure”, whatever that may mean,
Only a continual repetition of the door flung open, the strangled cry,
The blackened, bloated face staring at the pair of us, forever separate,
In mute and expressionless indictment.

He'd actually made it up into the tree stand
Two, maybe three years ago now
(Though finding the **** thing
Had been an adventure its ownself,
Finally seeing a bit of chair
Poking through a barricade of lounge chairs and potting soil)
Though not without more than a bit of trepidation and profanity,
(The climber stand heavier and bulkier than he remembered,
His hips and left knee as little less dexterous)
Eventually settling himself into the seat
To wait and ponder and try to balance the coffee intake
To stay in the interval between enough to warm
But not enough to have to **** like a **** racehorse.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed
When the buck came:  six points, and he reckoned
It would dress out close to two hundred pounds
And slowly, cautiously he sighted him
(It was at least a fair look--a shade inside ninety yards,
But some brush and branches keeping it
From being a clean **** shot)
Exhaling and stilling himself
But, inexplicably he would often tell himself later,
He did not fire, and perhaps it was because
He'd have to aim high due to the branches,
And he didn't want to risk simply winging him
Or, even worse, hitting him just solid enough
That he'd wander deeper into the woods to die
(Tracking him not something beyond his experience,
But an unwanted test of other faculties)
And maybe it was something else altogether,
But he'd pulled back and dropped the barrel.
Well son, he mused to himself
Looks like you drew a lucky ticket today.
He stayed in the tree for a little while longer
Until the coffee, long since past any pretense of warmth,
Gave out, and then he clambered down
(The process not any easier and that direction, he'd reckoned)
Hauling himself and acoutrements back to the truck,
The stand carefully placed back where he'd found it,
And as he headed back to the house
He hummed some indeterminate, vaguely hymnal tune
In testimony to the vagaries of time and venison jerky.