Shore in a Blue Bottle

I don’t know why but a poem is the
only way I can reach you
or the part in me that has so lost you,
a message scrawled on some
scrip of heart-tissue and rolled
into a blue bottle and set
off on first light’s tide
down at the shore where you are gone.

My grief for you is like a tide
which has longer intervals now,
its moon drifted further off into
oblivion’s deep space, its
gravitational pull a subtler
force, grown faint beyond ghostly,
arousing high tides of emotion
at odd, surprising moments,

like mid-afternoon yesterday
as summer rains fell heavily.
Amid the bolts and thunders
I was tweaking some layout
in the vast salt mine of my career
& listening to some song of yours
I had imported to my Mac’s
iTune library.

And then I saw, or rather felt
you walking with me down a
distant familiar shore, brother
and brother once again, solaced
so by the presence of your
living body next to mine,
your voice a true soft basso
in my ear, your mind working
through something aloud
so fully and true I thought,
for that moment, you were still alive:

Then I realized the reverie
was something from my memory
of thirty years ago when
we did walk a shore,
me 23 and just arrived in
Florida, you 17 and busting
at the britches to flee the state,
the two of us walking Cocoa Beach
on a fine summer morning
with the sky a pure azure,
washed clean by the last
night’s storm, the morning
sun slowly fiercing towards hot,
sand gentle as pelt on our
naked soles, the sound of
the surf’s slow wet rebounds
as a breeze tossed our hair—

who knows what we were talking about
but it was strange, so unaccustomed
to walking and talking together—
I hadn’t seen you in five or so years—
yet the moment was so familiar
at the same time, our shapes almost
identical, same height, same
family freight, same inclination
toward water, two Yankees
become Southern Oaks with
our soul-appendages reaching
toward the same great water
in a way so identical it startled us—

Brother and brother walking
a shore together, talking
in the eternity we may one day
share, maybe even yesterday
if my reverie was as authentic
as real experience can be,
the soul of that singular
moment rolled and stuffed
in a bottle and floated all
the way from 1980 to 2009,
a year after your death,
some months after the
daily work of remembering
you seemed finished,

delivering in one uncasked
moment something
quintessentially my brother
in the ennui of a summer’s
storm, something you’ll
never photograph again,
wrapped so lyrically in
music I was then listening to
a song which resounded
in your heart some years back
that you saved it,
the way I save you
writing these words down,

a song of beauty enough to
open a door back into a room
I pray I’ll always be able to find
where you and I can walk
and talk and laugh a summer’s day
at the edge of the ocean waters
which come from the
deepest regions of the heart,

the place where you and I
so love God’s day we sigh

& then turn back to
separating tasks, me looking
away from the window
where the rain is falling
in pure silver sheets
and focusing back on
the next labor in
my life’s remaining salt mine,

& you walking on
down that beach defined
by deeper shadows of pure blue,
your shape disappearing into
the music that I listen to,
something deep and heartfelt
whose title I can’t recall
something you left behind
of your life’s arc and fall.

Thunder and more rain,
the garden of my house
hopefully getting a good
measure of this water,
my wife embroidering
silver thread into white cotton
like this morning’s moonlight
making your presence lucent
on this page--
fainter now yet surer,
the pattern yet to emerge,
one brother absent,
the other walking on,
halves of some symbol
broken yet complete
exactly where they are.
together on a shore
inside a bottle floating home.