Blue bulbs on a Christmas tree

A photo taken by Timm a year ago in Silverton, Oregon.

1.

You died eight months
ago at this late-night
hour so I sit in vigil
and remembrance of you,
brother, friend, son
of the parents who
grieve you too.

The year now rows
to Christmastide,
darkest hour with its
hopeful star, a season
laden with the
sweetest most bitter
fruit, so much
childhood tinged
with adulthood’s
sadder affirmations.

There are few traces
of you now in the
day’s arrears of work
and worldly news; so
much has changed since
you died. Your candidate
got elected President
but he inherits a world that’s
fallen hard, the consequences
of which unrwrap
themselves in slo-motion
like an accident that
happened months ago
that only now is crunching down.

None of that you knew
when you went out running
that last time on April 17--
gas prices were soaring
(they swoon now) & Obama
was sure to lose the primary
in Pennsylvania. The job
market was still an open
and viable thing; surely
you were wondering about
where to send the next
resume as you rounded
those Salem streets
in the late afternoon
light of early spring.

When was it that you
felt that catch of heart
again which unlatched
the fatal flood? Had you
gotten back to your
apartment yet when
you felt the door
tear loose? We’ll never
know. You farewell
is written in a
hospital report which
conveys the news
but not the view
you had of your
last hours, gurneyed
and attached to
equipment which
blipped and then
droned flat.

No, you’re not
coming home this
Christmas as you
thought you might
when you emailed
a friend about the
last Christmas; we
can’t expect you to
fill the expectant door
of a son making his
way home. You aren’t
coming up our sidewalk
past the garden, steps
heavy as my own,
sure as a man who
has made his own
way so many years.

I strain to hear that
sound this morning
in the gardens near-silent
weave of crickets -- it’s
warm again -- but silence
is what reigns. Nothing
to pronounce your
homecoming this
Christmas season
except where grief
lays its wilted lilac at the door
where we go on
without you, brother,
friend, son, more
alone now, shadowed
by all the history
you were meant to
have had you not
died last April
at about this time.

Farewells should be
done but this is the
first Christmas without
you so a bit more
remembering is due.


2.

My wife and I set our
Christmas tree out
in the garden this year
and it burns the darkness
with startling hope --
white and red and green lights
in staunch faith of
those Christmasses
so long ago when your
blue eyes took in
the Christmas tree
with pure wonder
and expectation.

Dreams of what is
tucked inside a gift’s
bright wrappings
always got the better of you,
you became so rapt
imagining what was there
your patent Christmas
move was to peek before
the proper time.

You were only three or
four years old when you snuck
into Molly’s closet
to unwrap her gift for you,
a pair of blue Batman slippers.
Content, sucking your thumb,
you slowly walked the stairs
to where the rest of us
had gathered in the parlor,
greeted by Molly’s
outraged howls to see
her present stolen,
booty fitted on her
brother’s criminal feet.

A family legend.
What was in your
so-young mind which
grew so huge with hope
that you couldn’t wait
a moment longer and
went to any length to
find out the contents
of a gift meant for a later day,
shaking presents to divine
their contents like
some tea-leaf reader
of imagined Christmas joy?

I see you gazing at
the undercarriage of our tree,
your eyes like two big
blue Christmas bulbs,
aglint with merry fires
which lasted for too
short a season for you;
by aged seven Christmas
had become a sundered joy,
a history of separate loves
on holidays bereft of snow
beneath the brilliant
Florida sun.

Mom tried so hard to
make it still real for you,
decking the trees of your
years down South
with all the oranaments
which were separated
from the whole of our
sundered family,
invoking Christmas cheer
upon the sparser boughs
she could afford.

But you didn’t seem to notice
her attempts to give all
she could, not the way you spoke
and wrote about your latter
childhood--the years of damage,
wounds breaking open
with thirsts no thing can quell.
Those hurts kept you
from ever acknowledging
her gifts and you didn’t send
gifts back her way for
birthdays or Mother’s Days
or Christmasses.

(I account the measure
of your late adulthood
in the gifts you began to
send in your last years --
gorgeous framed photos
of flowers, bouquets
rich with the healing
power of beauty you
believed in, gifts which
succor and quell
and endure ...)

You learned to get steal
all your gifts as latent addicts
do, reveling in the theft
of fire, its hot thirst
which you later would
find an ocean to dive into
and drown in blue. Hoarding
your thefts like coups,
a vault of stolen pleasures
which could only increase
thirst to burning
without measure.

Of that bum history I
know only a little, brother --
stuff I’ve lifted from your
journals, mostly, from
all those years of abuse
and recovery. Trying
to find you in those
sources, the man you
became who I should
have loved and treated
like the brother you were.

We’re not so different
in those histories. I have
been around longer, long
enough perhaps to come
full circle and sing the
family I tossed into
the yuletide fires.

I spent Christmas
in Florida at 18,
my first visit back
with Mom and Molly
and you in five years
when I too travelled
West, leaving, I thought,
my home for good.

I had just finished
a visit with Dad at
his new home in
Pennsylvania’s woods
-- OK, it was built in
1832 --, seeing my
father find ground
where he sought
to remake the man
in a mystery of
stones and woods.

It was harder visiting
you all in Florida,
my religious beliefs
flung off in despair
of God’s wreckage
of a home (forgive me,
I was foolish and young).
A quick visit and
I would fly back
to Washington
where my life kept
falling apart; and
yet I found a family
smile there which
made my cold
comforts out West
seem hard, even
brutal; and as I
harrowed my winter
sitting by a heat grate
with a quart of beer
between my legs, dreams
of Florida kept coming
back to me, calling
me eventually home.

You were still in high
school then; somehow
we bunked together in
your tiny room.
I kept my Christmas
gifts for all of you
in my footlocker.
One day I came
back from a walk
(reveling in a warm
December) to hear sounds
in your room; when I opened
the door you fell heavily
over the footlocker and
lay there, busted, caught
in the flagrant act of peeking.

Ever hopeful of what was
latent in the Christmas dream,
though what we both found
was that the gift was only a
symbol of reborn love,
God’s joy inside the infant
mewling in a distant manger.
We’d have to find that joy
in other, much later
and adult-ish ways,
surrendering the thirst
to overfill the cup,
pouring it full out
to serve another.


3.

Surely you learned
about this too along
the hard years of
finally growing up.

You brought hope
and happiness to so many
in your latter years,
reaching out to help
a drunk or a suffering
member of your
Congresswoman’s district,
giving exactly what was
so big in you when
you looked upon those presents
under the tree so long ago.

The legacy of those old
dreams translated into
living, loving truths
lives on in the memory
of all you touched;
I could see it in
the eyes of so many
who attended your memorial
& spoke so deeply
of your love—eyes
reflecting what you
saw beneath the tree
all those years ago.

And of the masterly photos
you created in your latter years--
the sum of them is like
a pile of gifts beneath
the tree for all to gaze upon
and wonder, receiving the
balm and joy of beauty,
sunsets and waterfalls,
kids and dogs, snowy days
too perfect for anything
but the memory of a dream,
reflections of what
you saw under the
Christmas tree all
those years ago.

Blue bulbs of perfect wonder
closed forever now
though I find you everywhere a
simple gift’s perceived,
like our cat Belle purring
on my chest as I write
these final lines, looking
so much like a young
version of Zooey who
died last summer. Like
Hugo staring out the window
at the night centered by
our blinking blazing
Christmas tree.

Like the modern carol
“I’ll Be Home For Christmas”
that’s playing in my ear
as I write, heard
on a stereo from long long
ago when you and I were young
and forever at home,

there where all our hopes and
finally happy fates
like Christmas bells were rung.