Inventory

That's Mom and I in Timm's apartment later on Saturday, April 19, preparing copy for Timm's memorial. Siblings Molly and Will are there, too. (Will took the picture with Timm's camera.)

No more for you this first-of-day
matin between a soul and the
word and God’s greater world:
You stopped mid-stride one night
and disappeared, one hand
reaching for the next day’s door
with the other clutching at
the shatter of your heart.

Letting you go depends so much
upon seeing you here, in
taking account of your life
as best as I can: And so I conjure
you from what I remember and
what of you remains. Today I
go back a month to the
morning I entered your world at last:

Your apartment was like a vault
secreted behind a shrine -- a grave,
really -- when I first entered
it that cold rainy Saturday
morning after you died,
your real life’s sanctum
at last revealed to me and
your siblings and mother,
a space eerily still,
everything you are
without you ever in it again
there, suspended like the motes
of dust that were swirling
in the air as the parameds
hauled you out on the gurney
Thursday night April 17.

Your girlfriend Christie greeted
me at the door, still stunned
by the roundhouse blow
to her life by your death,
looking at me that first glance
as a strangely familiar trope
on you, my voice on the phone
a few minutes earlier (asking
to see your apartment before I
had to drive back to the airport
in Portland to pick up my sister
and mother) so much, she said,
like yours; me in the door to your
apartment almost looking like you
but not, tall like you tall but
my face carved a bit different.

I forget what we said right then, my
mind was elsewhere, reading voraciously
all my eyes took in of your apartment’s
cramped and dim blue quarters,
panning like some desperate prospector
for glints of your life which you had
kept so separate from ours, deigning,
for reasons which we only think we
know, to live out your days and ways
a continent removed from all kin.

And here you were at last, at least
who you were in the tally of stuff:
your apartment was small for all
that you had crammed in it,
bulging with a mid-40s bachelor
life you were outgrowing like
a root-bound plant too long in its pot.

First the living room, dim and sepia
from the gloom of the morning’s rain,
the couch long enough for you to lay
on it head to toe, your sandals still
laying next to it on the floor, your
backpack containing your big Nikon
camera and the other pack holding
this laptop at the foot of the couch;

A low coffee table was across from
the couch and littered with
photo magazines, some CDs with music
mixes and pictures (for jobs, I’m sure,
you were working on; the last photo
dated on your laptop was a picture
of the Silverton farmer’s market
with two young people sampling
vegetables from bright wicker baskets),
a candle half-burned, a few business cards
(contacts at the Oregon Garden
and a state agency on abuse shelters).

In one corner of the living room
the obligatory big TV and
stereo rack, plus stacks of
music CDs on the floor.
In another corner a chair
with a lamp on an upturned crate
that nested more photography
how-two books and two albums
of photos from your growing up
and wandering years; on the walls
a hanging from your Bolivia trip,
one of your waterfall pictures
in a nice frame (Christie said you
were so reluctant to show off
your work, the framed picture
on the wall was a very recent addition).

Your kitchen was crammed in one corner
with boxes of CDs and miscellany
and tools, piled as if you had no place
for that old stuff but were unwilling yet
to let it go; a writing desk (you like
to work standing up, or had to due
to the restlessness in your bones)
cluttered with papers (mostly
old bills and photo invoices). The
fridge was half-filled with vegetarian fare,
tahini and apples and old-looking lettuce,
stuff that helped you lose 20
pounds in the past several years.

The cupboards were crammed with
a motley of glasses and dishes and
mugs; sprouts and baggies half-filled
with cumin and curry and other spices
sat on the sill of a dirty window that
looked out on a wet grey parking lot
where your silver SUV was parked,
your hard-ridden, still-muddy trail bike
slung on a rack on its back, both at rest
at last from the hard use you had
put to them in your need for motion--:

I looked at your stuff so briefly in passing--
we only had a couple days to do your
memorial service and wrap up what we
could of your life before having to fly home --
I can only see all of that stuff you
left behind from ten leagues down,
my memory of that morning is
slipping so fast that I must write
it all down here today as best as I can
so let me resume:

A hot water closet was filled with
all of your outerwear, jackets and parkas
and windbreakers and suitcoats, all
just about my size (who else
is tall like you and me and has such
gorilla-long arms?); there were snowshoes
and racketball rackets and a
vacuum on the floor;

A cupboard was filled with dry goods
and kitchen implements on one
shelf, stuff for your health on
another shelf -- supplements
(creatine powder and beta carotine)
and vitamins (C and B) and
prescriptions (Ritalin, blood pressure
meds, Singulair) amid boxes of
gauze and two rolled Ace bandages,
the top shelf filled with loose-leaf
binder filled with slide-studded sleeves;

A bookcase in the hall next to the
bathroom overflowed with AA texts
and nonfiction and pulp fiction
and old classics, journals piled amid
magazines – you too read widely; --
above the case some enlarged
pictures on the wall curling with age
or steam from the bathroom --
two women dressed as woodland fairies,
a sunset, a mountain, a forest waterfall.

Your bathroom was plebian and
clean enough (though Christie
said she had tidied things
up before I had gotten there), the
medicine cabinet filled with
the usual mix of shaving cream
and old medicines; your guitar
in its hardshell case
was leaning against the small
wall in the hall outside your
bedroom, silent, tuned, still warm
with your hands, resonant with
your sweet voice.

Your bedroom was the most
crammed of all, somehow managing
to hold a large bed, a desk
and a dresser (both crammed
to the gills) several old computers,
a file cabinet (full), all of your other
photography gear (lights and tripods,
boxes crammed with slides and photo CDs)
in a vast pile next to the door; your
closet was filled with what looked like
everything you’ve worn since high
school; an old stereo was piled on the
shelf amid rackets and gear.

Such sadness in that apartment
as I recount its inventory now,
all those beginnings shelved
and crammed in its nooks,
some day to be fully realized
not by you but by your
verse executor, this brother
who only now, after you’re gone,
looks out for you, who too quietly
accepted you as you were
as our lives would drone on
so far apart, distantly liking each
other, maybe one day to get around
to more ...

Anyway, there was little
to save from what you left behind:
your laptop (which I now have),
your camera (now in your other
brother’s hands), your photo archives
(mine), some music CDs and pix
(Mom), -- that’s all we brought home,
a few boxes. We sorted through
your papers trying to find outstanding
bills and other legal paperwork,
keeping what little we though could
matter. The rest your girlfriend
will donate to charity or throw out.

Your apartment’s empty now, or
occupied by the next life in transit,
the next to set up camp in its
dingy temporary trope on home,
filling it with stuff, I’ll bet, as ragtag
and halfassedly maintained
as yours.

Not that there wasn’t gold.
Two boxes of it -- photo archives mainly --
are in the study I share with my wife,
opened, rummaged, waiting for me to
properly catalogue and shelve
amid all my crap, the tonnage
of these words.

What I want to end with today is
the sense of suiting up: I trudge
forth here into my day out from this
poem of your apartmental home,
clad in your shirt and shoes,
your backpack over my shoulder
with laptop in tow, humming
Chris Botti’s “Forgiven” which
was in my ear when I woke, my
house gorgeous because of
my wife’s real love, old Zooey
eating from her bowl & the garden
slumbering in rain-drenched
full moonlight, happy in the matins
which are ghosted by your tall frame,

Your smile almost as indecipherable
as my handwriting -- so hurried,
gobbling the next line down the page.
The next damn day in paradise
more with and without you than ever,
with so much incomplete, not fully said
or surely enough, with the first
summer you won’t some day share
with me cracking wide the egg.

Cherry trees in blossom next to a graveyard near Mount Angel, Oregon. (Photo by Timm from March 2007).