Crossroads

The photograph now more than 40 years
old is almost bleached of color but there
we are, we three boys and Dad, me and
Will on either side of Dad who’s
smiling with a pipe stuck out one side
and his arms over us both, posing
for Mom’s camera before we were to
head out for our only camping trip together.

You’re there too, at 3 or 4 too young
to go along, standing on your tippytoes
to belong, to qualify by means of height
for inclusion in the adventure. But we
just smiled for the camera until it clicked
and then pulled away, patting you on
the head, tut-tutting There There
before hurrying off to the station wagon
with its sleeping bags & fishing
poles & cookout grub.

You broke into a vast crying jag,
inconsolably left behind. Mom trundled
you off to the kitchen for a cookie or two
sitting in your high chair while she
cleaned up in the kitchen: How long
did you think of us before
the Oreos took over, balming where
you hurt most with bites of sugar
and black wafer, your tears drying
to the sound of my mother humming songs
as she loaded up the dishwasher?
Only now do I imagine you there,
a waste of tears and frustration
at always being too young, too small
to be counted in our adventures.

Back then you faded with that house
and its certain fate as we drove out
of Evanston, driving on to
to Pleasant Valley Farm where
we were to meet up with Roger Brown
and his son Stevie who was about Will’s age.
Chicago’s westernmost ‘burbs faded
into eventual cornfields so tall
they showered heaven with gold.

But bro, as camping trips always went for me,
you didn’t miss much on that one;
our without-you-overnighter in the
woods was a leaky balloon which had
farted almost completely an hour after
we got there, Will and I fighting over how to fish
& where to hike, so much so I ended up
fishing by myself while Will and Stevie
looked for bears and plunder in the woods.

My fishing pole hovering over
that flat pond with the afternoon
headed nowhere, red-and-white-striped
bobber still as death, failing to deliver
the slightest tremor of fish booty.

Did what you dreamt of our outing
salt your own taste for the outdoors?
For me, the real jaunt only
confirmed the sanctity of my
self-complete (and yes, -infected)
great indoors.

That night after overdone burgers
and marshmallows burnt black on sticks
we battled mosquitoes and each other
in a rank and sweaty tent. Outside Dad
and Roger drank bourbon by the fire,
their malted voices rising
rougher and merrier til we slept,
unbound of real wilderness, free at last.

I hated the jammed cloister with my
brother and Stevie; hated the fetor
of our boy farts in that tent; hated the
stony ground oppressing up through
my sleeping bag; hated everything about
the great outdoors. I was never one for
Boy Scout trips, conniving ways to come
home early -- usually on crutches.
Of those pre-manly rituals I was most
inept and soft and girly, the real woods
far too uncomfortable for me.

I grew to love the imagined adventure
up inside my head. The all-time favorite
book from my childhood was My Side
of the Mountain, where a boy flees his
home to fare alone in the wilderness,
carving out a home from the side of
a huge old oak. Loved that tale the
way as an adult I love Moby Dick,
the rawest adventure on the wave
I will never have to truly sail.
The armchair adventurer, that’s me,
with a pen for a harpoon, the garden
outside my window swooning up
into summer sufficing for the wildest wood.

Perhaps that camping trip was seminal
for us in opposite ways, me coming home
quit of real woods forever and you seeded
that same night (clutching your blanket
and sucking your thumb) with a dream
for roaming real wilderness
you would later birth frame after
frame with your Nikon.

The two of us cross paths only now,
only here, with you now dead six weeks
and me crying all this ink, wandering your
woods calling out your name.

Your photographic vistas have no compare;
you travelled so far to to shoot them
and were patient when you found them,
snapping gigs of the richest data to
sing forth a scene so evanescent
it feels like happy birth to watch them.

Well, the eyes that saw those scenes
now belong to the newly unblinded,
the mind which dreamt them
is a ghost here, only what I can imagine
of your wishes and fears and loves,
your full heart pressed on pages
like leaves from a golden autumn lost.

Is that homage or do I just rip you off
for my own song, making use of your death
to add some pathos to my life? That photograph
of our long-lost embarkation
has enough to prosecute me for a
criminal enough neglect, a mythic
abandonment so blithe of any concern
for you, trooping off to adventure
while you squalled in misery, alone, alone, alone.

Well, bro, you didn’t miss much, no matter
what you thought back then. At that
crossroads I was cured of all
wilderness except in books and you
received you photographic jones, me
content to roam far on pages while
you filled your camera with real sights.

In the end, neither quite matters, does it
bro? Though we sure think it so,
believing the next poem or image
would loose us into true wilderness
at last, God’s naked bounty revealed
to us and only us, with a pierce of
beauty so sharp to the eye as to crucify
us there and then with ecstatic nails
which drive us deepest into woods
imagined, real, who cares?

You didn’t quite get that far but
you were close. Your ghost holds me
to the task of finding out how close --
a bit of brotherly competition, yes (you
mocking each drab of ink I spill in
the name of what I call art), but also
mentoring me further, fathering me
in the arts of dying, deep in those
woods I fear and seek to adventure
in the most.

Because that’s the wilderness inside
the woods, the wild bite of raw north
wind at the mountaintop, the brutal
beauty of the rough wave collapsing on
most-western shores: the treasure
hardest to attain is inside a grave,
where life has voyaged on to shores
too distant to see, much less understand,
though I’m trying, bro, I’m trying.

We’re back together in that picture
though the sequences and mood
is reversed, me and Dad and Will
all earnest to know where you have gone,
your mother and sister too, all of us
crying in blue misery for the
lost grin on your face,
our days so flat and suburban,
so filled with the work of aging
day after ding dong dilly dally day.

And you -- smiling elsewhere,
your hour of suffering on earth done,
ranging massy forests beyond
the miles and miles and miles
of cornfield, continents away
and yet here, over my shoulder,
whispering See? and I told you so.