Well, bro ...

Timm took this picture in Medford on March 19, 2008.

Timm passed away two months ago today. Seems like a lifetime ago, but also just yesterday. By way of remembrance, I include this poem which I wrote on April 19.

* * *

WELL, BRO ...

... You didn’t make it. The parameds
came and took you to the hospital
where you died. That heart of yours
just gave out. As we sat in my mother’s
living room yesterday morning we tried
to remember just which of us had
the heart murmur as a child -- had to be you.

Outside it was obscenely
lovely, happy breezes, the full
warm dazzle of Florida in bloom,
a tree across the street so burning
with ghastly yellow blossoms.

So many details hid the grief
right now: flights to book, calls to make to
shocked friends and relatives,
the sound of I Love You at the
end of those calls sounding hollow,
like a voice alone in a vast room.

I sit now in a hotel room in
downtown Salem on the day
after you died, watching cold
rain smear the darkened window,
pouring into a wound in me
that seems forever empty.

Maybe numbness is a form
of protection; otherwise we’d
slide off the heart into its doom.
Not the way you went, which was
a mouth up out of nowhere. For us,
its the threat of getting sawed
to pieces in the infernal of
knowing that you're dead.

But I’ll take that lot over yours.
We have each other on this side,
our cats, our dogs, our homes
and small routines, the incessant plate
of daily details which never quite get finished.

Flying west from Atlanta my plane
was in perpetual twilight, four and
a half hours of slow ebb of daylight
as we chased the sun’s departure,
never retrieving it, ever reaching
for a dimmer view of it, never
quite getting it or you back.

A faint enough light still on
the most distant porches of
horizon as we began our
descent into Portland around
10 p.m. far western time,
tracing your last footsteps
on earth. So dark when
we landed, you gone for good.