My brother's keeper

A photo of Timm from Columcille in 1983, when he was 19.

MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

April 24, 2008

O God it’s great to sit here again in
this white writing chair with the
Florida day singing in the garden outside
the opened window, birdsong mixing
with morning traffic. It’s 7 a.m., I slept
long having turned into our driveway
at last around 1:30 a.m.. Home, home,
dear God sweet home again.
Feeling my wife’s sleeping body
along my chest and face and arms
and loins, having held her and slept
next to her the rest of the night’s short while.

It’s rough this morning, bad headache,
sore throat, a weariness deep in
the mines of my bones: but I’m home,
sitting here in the hosannahs of our
small town morning with
Zooey fed and curled on the towel
next to my feet which is her
day-bed. She didn’t miss a beat
when I came in last night, hobbled
into the kitchen and commenced
crying for food, plaintive yowls
so loud we figure she’s almost deaf.

Home. A copy of your memorial
service slipped out of this journal
as I reached for it, and it is with
your heavy silver pen that I write
these lines today. Your absence
is so rich, a silvery lode deep
in the weariness and grief, the
newest dead voice in the trough
I pour this black blood out to.

This poem’s your oracle, dark
waters tiding the coracle of a
writing hand from I to Thou,
reaching for your dark-drifting bier.

That lush Oregon valley
I rushed through with my mother
and siblings for four days slowly
settles down under this next day,
dark water sieving the labyrinth
of soul into the aquifer we share.

Your wet geography sings
Go West in my ear, deeply wounded
in ways it is my deep guilt to both
have committed and suffered.
O errant brother and fellow victim,
our mutual mission to grow
maddened, sibylline, in the divine’s
wild fumes, to burble and froth
in the the long night, harrowing
the temple we would become.

To you the urgency and emptiness,
fated by a worse history than mine:
or was it? Even our errancies show
the god’s handles, Apollo riding
the dolphin to Delphi, secure aboard
a wave-galloping womb,
seeking a shore on which
the temple could take root at last,
begin the hard work of growing up.

I can’t presume to know the brother
Time’s indifferent cudgels has
banished me from -- all the sifting
through your effects will never
fully sing your life, your agony
and questing, your loves, the dirt.
That was yours and it fled when
your heart collapsed in the earliest
hours of April 18 2008.

But in weird ways we’re twins,
given the same strange wings
of preference and history
by natural selection, genes and
the fate of our God’s will.

We flew in ways similar and not,
the way your girlfriend saw a bit of you
in my height and voice as well
is in the color of our older brother’s hair
as we stood quietly looking
at your dead face at the viewing.

Though you would beg the difference
that a younger brother needs to
have his own identity, I saw
a strangely familiar arc to our lives
though we’ve fared wholly apart.

I came to feel in later years that we
were cut of the same cloth, that
we had the same ache and desire
for God in this life. That we were
twin expressions of reverence for
beauty in this world and were
both pastors of it. “Beauty heals,”
you once wrote to your mother
about your love of photography,
and it does, Orphically uniting
us back in the world’s womb.
Well, maybe you sing on there,
deep in the beauty you so loved.

As your brother and achingly
familiar with that love,
I will do what I can to give your
life something more than burial at last.
I’ll help with the affairs of your
real life -- find out from the docs
how you could have died so young,
wrap your your business, order
your archives, converse with your friends
and loves, and do the archeology
to sum up your life as best as I can.

But across and down the naked page
it’s a slightly different task.
Here you and I are the same
impulse to heal with the balm of
beauty, for better and worse.

O Timm you spent great care
taking the best shots, shooting
dozens of frames, arranging the
scene just so, moving the camera
inches this way then that,
moving a leaf here or there in
the foreground, worried that the
glade in the frame would look
too composed, as if the artistry
of nature must never look too intended.

You were so mindful of effects, touchups
and tweaks, all that craft behind
the scenes which makes a picture
look so phantasmagorically natural --
the work of beauty is intense.

Nature hands us a canvas already painted
but we must crop it ourselves, hold
it up just so, offering that partial
nth as the soul of the whole which
our partial senses see as God.

O brother, I have so much to learn
from you. Maybe there’s time. I’ll do
what I can. I’ll live this life which is
only partially mine as you dreamt
and so tried, love it fully, tend it well,
and give it back better than when I
received it, grown as far as it will go.
Your work was always my work, bro,
tho it couldn’t show until you fell.