Christmas Letter

December 23, 2009

Greetings little brother,
this is your elder not oldest
always half-inch taller
brother David checking in
to wish you Christmas comfort
and cheer--whether because
you could use it or I need
it more than ever in
remembering you, a task
which is ever more what
it has always been,
trying to keep a wave
from ebbing out of grasp.

I say “little” brother because
you get younger every year that
passes between your dying
and my living on—our gap
in is now almost two years
wider—but also because
in my memory the image of you
at four or seven is clearer than
the visage and height of the
man you became. Perhaps it’s
just because that child was
part of my own growing up,
while the man you grew into
was such an occasional
crossroads in my own
history, our meetings a half
dozen times over the
past three decades
always welcome, familiar
and filial and even close
in ways neither of us
tried to name, not at least
while we were together,
times which always were fleeting.

But that child I see racing
down the snowy hill on
a red plastic saucer, there
next to our house in Evanston
now four decades gone:
There is something in what
was your essential nature
which I sense deepest now
that time has alloyed
the presence that you were:
You would have stayed
that young if you could,
am I right? Free of every warp
and twist and shatter
which turns every child
into the eventual adult,
banished from the womb
of childhood’s Eden
to make one’s way alone
in the forest of the real.
You stayed loyal to that child
as the years poured on
through your short life’s glass,
keeping childhood’s wide-eyed
stare of wonder at the world
intact in all the photos that you took.

Did you know you would
die first, the youngest of our clan,
creating such a paradox
of beginnings and ends for
the rest of us? Growing tall
in adolescence, you proclaimed
your greatest wish was to sprout
taller than even me but
ended up a shy half inch short.
That distinction could never
be your own, though when
you wore your cowboy
boots at your sister’s wedding
you walked down the aisle
my equal. As life’s
ambitions go you missed
out on that one, but
in death you’ve earned
the title of the first to go.
a depth none of us will equal.
Sorry, but we would
trade any of our own
unsurpassings to have
you simply back
among us. You want to be
the tallest? Here, take my
shrinking inch …




But I digress. It’s cold this morning,
perhaps the coldest of the year
in Central Florida, down in the
30’s, this night the first
between the winter solstice
and Christmas and faithful
to the harrow, hallowing
the stars which burn on so
patiently and old up there behind
a scree of thin cirrus which
tide tonight’s hard skies.
Traffic’s light in the commute
to work and back because
school’s out; there’s
Christmas music everywhere
in the crowded malls
where grim parents
dig deep into their pockets
to buy exactly what
makes a kid’s eyes shine bright.
Well, all of that sleeps now,
exhausted in equal
measure to the expectant,
leaving just a cold soft-breezing dark
so pregnant with itself
I can feel the next’s year’s womb stir.

A silent night; a holy night;
a lonely one without my kid brother.





The cold though is its own comfort,
bringing out the blanket on my lap
upon which Belle our calico is
curled and sleeps, just to the
left of your laptop which I
have put to our common uses,
writing things down, praising
the beautiful image, and
yes, writing resumes just
like you did, over and over,
angling for some pedigree
which will help us find a bridge
across the country’s recession.
(12.7 percent unemployment
here in Lake County)—and
into the strange and virulently
changing century you saw
just eight years of.
Such employments of your
laptop don’t mean much to Belle—
I write sideways when she’s
with me as today, claiming
a space of warmth and
sleeping down into it,
leaving me cramped but
happy for the union with
the living while my hands
tap out its symbolic brogue,
a life of its own perhaps
forever short of the real thing.

As if a Christmas letter
sent off in a cyber bottle on
eternity’s dark tide has
any hope of reaching
what has been forever lost.






--But on, at last, to my errand.
What I meant to write
to you about was my walks
up and down Crescent Beach
near St. Augustine at dawn
a few weekends ago, when my
wife and I spent three days
in a condo her parents had rented
right there on the beach. The view
from those big windows
was spectacular and the beach
close to pristine, of fine
white sands and loud surf composed,
development stopped just south
of this condo complex marking
where the federal preserve began,
a national park mostly
for a fort built by the Spanish
in 1760 along an inlet down
the beach which fed a
waterway’s back route
to the city. Fort Matanzas
was named after the inlet
which got its own handle
after three hundred French
Hugenots were slain by the
Spanish in the 16th century
who were battling for rights to
a land whose real sustaining
value proved to be shores and
birds and flowers.

(Remember flowers?)

The Hugenots were given the option
of conversion or death, and its
seems that most simply bowed
their heads, accepting the red
martydom (in another account,
the Spanish simply couldn’t
afford to garrison so many men);
crazy perhaps to our modern
sense, but you and I both know
many drunks who were offered
a spiritual way out and chose
instead to turn back to
the wall of the alcoholic night
instead and died.




Our state – Florida –
was so named in honor
of flora which burn on
while the rest of the country
up north freezes into boreal.
“Matanzas” means “Slaughters,”
a handled which proved
only foundational since
the fort which came
to be built along its waters
was rarely saw any action
over the centuries.
One of its cannons lobbed
at shell once at British longboats
(the inlet’s far too shallow
for a proper galleon) when
they thought to blockade
St. Augustine that way
The redcoats turned tail
and that was that. A place
with enough history for
us rootless Floridians—
a toehold on the greater
story is enough for us--that
the fort was rebuilt in
the1930s and the area
declared a national park.

My wife’s father and I
toured the fort one afternoon,
pressing hands against the
old stone walls and cold
cannon throats, stepping out
of the wind into a barrack
which had six tiny
bunks of straw, a few rifles
and a crucifix. From up top
the view was purely of
a shoreland’s wilderness,
shaped and carried as
all barrier islands are
by the tide’s rise and ebb
over the centuries.(No one
knows exactly where the
French were slaughtered
since the inlet itself has moved
this way then that by storm
surges.) We come and go,
but the ocean flows eternal
or almost so—two billion
years and counting—a book
too large and thick for
any one of us to read
though we certainly try
walking down its shores.
A book your name is written
in, with a mark which
represents your life—
a flower perhaps, or a shoe,
a red saucer turned sideways …





Your ashes are scattered around
this continent, somewhere
in the mountains of Oregon (if
your girlfriend’s gotten around to it),
at Dad’s place in eastern Pennsylvania
& in the memorial garden
of a public cemetery here in Florida.
A wide, landed scatter, encompassing
the arc which took you as far
west as two feet can walk.
I’d like my ashes, at least
some of them, to go into the
tide off Melbourne where I
was baptized at 14; Mom also
thinks to have some of her
ashes cast upon the Florida
ocean she so loves. Ashes
to mountains, dust to ebbing wave;
so we all go back to
the world’s wild places
that the sun will rise again.

Ah, sorry: my letter once again
digresses, like the mind
of a person on a long walk,
like the two I took on Crescent
Beach on two successive dawns.
The weather was dark and cold
and windy, especially the first
day, down in the lower ‘40s
with an Edmonton Clipper
bearing down. It was beach weather
of the other sort, the one which
consoles with heavy hands,
the brute elements of time
at it again on this next day.
The sky heavily beclouded
& looking like the insides
of an oyster, striated with
pearl-grey ceruleans
unscrolling from the hard north
& sweeping over this
old white beach, headed far out
to sea where the sun was
struggling up for a brief
appearance before disappearing
behind the clouds. Only
me and a few flocks of gulls
toughed out those early
walks, the condos and
beachfront mansions
almost all deserted (a
squat white modernist
beachfront house up
the shore belonged,
I was told, to Michael
Jordan; it looked like it
hadn’t seen a human
soul in years). South
of the property line (where
the Ft. Matanzas national
park began) it was really
empty, just a loud mash
of surf and slowly cusping
light with winds so strong
they whipped the sands along
my feet like pouring souls.




A solitary, wintry land,
boarded up and left for
warmer seasons round the
year’s revolving glass.
Alone with that eternity,
I trudged down to the
inlet and in a ways,
taking pictures here and
there for reasons I did
not quite know—I am
no photographer, that’s for sure,
short of patience and talent
where your older brother
has plenty, just like you did.
Maybe we three were walking
along through that viewfinder,
the Cohea boys (it rhymes)
riding once again,
huffing and farting
and laughing about the
bewilderments of life and
love like we never quite
got around to sharing. Suffice
to say I carried the
photographic torch that day for you
and for Will who carries on
your work with your camera
and also for our mother, the one
who taught us how to shoot
a good picture not with
any special technique other
than the grace of patience,
of waiting for the image in
one’s heart to line up
with the beloved in the lens.

Patience. It was good
to have the time to linger
with my camera over
that slowly waking beachside
day lost to winter and you.
Whatever I shot those
cold dark mornings I share
first here, perhaps only here,
my Christmas gift to you
from the world which has
nearly forgotten you,
your high-tide line almost
fully erased by the next.
I hope you see beauty in
them, their wan tans
and pewters so much
like the bittersweet
canvas I call your life
or our loss of it,
colors faithful to the
way winter grieves for
warmer months
with tears of dark and cold.
And as shores seam the
firmaments of land and
sea together along a single
thin stretch of sand, so
these photos place a flower
on your altar exactly where
you left us, exactly where
we forever search the
incoming tide in vain for you.




And so I walked that
shore, walking, walking,
talking in my head to
God, praying that all be well,
thinking of my wife
who doesn’t care for
beachside walks yet
whose presence next
to mine in marriage
is surely a great shore.

Walking too in
some spell of vanity
which made me think
you understood just what I
saw, the way I vainly
think you’re reading this.
Believing, foolishly
and all-too-humanly
that you’re still with us
in the resonance of that
loud-crashing tide, a sound
which murmurs in my
ears two weeks later,
even though I know
I’m just imagining it.
Just as I now imagine
I hear your voice singing
a song you wrote for
my first wedding
twenty years ago (what I
would give for a tatter
of those lyrics, just
a fingerbone of driftwood
carved with a word or two).
Just as I imagine the
sound of us talking
across the table on
our back porch when you
got back from your
trip to Chile in ’03,
calm and almost happy,
Just as I imagine I
hear the long soar of
your screaming glee
as you streaked down
the snow-packed hill
next to our house in
Evanston on that Christmas
Eve I recalled in
the reverie I wrote in ‘87
as a family Christmas gift,
a memory which is
most substantial on pages
almost as thin as your
face flickering out
in the garden by
our dark Christmas tree.






For now I carry on,
ferrying toward my own
eventual last shore a heart
made fuller by your absence,
my grief awakening a
love which would not
quite waken when you lived,
not enough to count.
Maybe I’m just still making
amends for that—guilt
travels a very long road—
but perhaps this Christmas
letter is our walk down that
winter’s shore, present
and not, the heart’s fullness
summed from both.






Belle stirs a moment in
my lap and looks up to
me with eyes full of
sleepy contentment – how
else should we look
out on this day so close
to Christmas? A happy
heart is love’s full silo,
I believe, it granary
leaking gold from every
pore. You taught me
that we make those hearts,
deciding to sing of the
world’s half-fullness as
past the brim, making
of every still moment
captured in the lens
or in the life a smile
of celebration that life endures
even when it can’t.
There is an odd
unfoldment of our lives,
composed of tandems
which share a shore:
We picked out Belle
at the Cat Protection Society
because of Zooey, the
ancient calico we rescued
off the streets and gave
a good life for the year
she lived on. Hugo our dumb
Maine coon is the shaggy familiar
of Red, that stray rogue
who loved my wife’s pets so
much he transformed from
squirrel- killer into mama’s boy
after ten seconds under
her cooing soft hand.
And Violet our Siamese
is Buster’s daughter, in a way,
the living bridge back to
his death almost a decade ago.

Zooey (d. 2008) and Belle, our calicos.

Red (d. 2003) and Hugo, our shaggy creampuff males.

Buster (d. 2000) and Violet, the orientals.

And your tandem? What
moves into your absence
to thrive? Not a son
in the way of kin and kind—
our family won’t see that—
the name Cohea, at least
of our branch will end
on our eventual graves,
perhaps as all names should,
written in the sand before
the night’s final high tide.

No, it’s something else,
the outlines of which are
faint, only slowly coming
into present focus. Yes,
your images endure—how
could they not, so full
of life and beauty--but only so
with the husbandry
and care of the living.
I took up the task of
archiving and sharing
your work as a form of
amends for the brother I
couldn’t quite be in life.
I believe that I’ve become
less myself in the act
and my creative urges
have stilled and grown distant
(how little I’ve actually written
this year!). Become my
brother’s keeper, I’ve
become some third entity
between who I was
and who you were.
These hands tapping on
the laptop this letter
to you are reaching
out, through the screen
and deep into the tide,
trying to find yours
over there and hold on
to you as long as I can,
in all the ways I failed
to down all the real years
that passed. I am now
the tender of a fading
memorial, still trying
to secure a place
where your wonders can
be treasured and take on
a life of their own.
So the tandem which
bridges who you were
to what you’ve become
is this shore I now walk,
my voice bearing a few
far notes of your resonance.
Or perhaps I so fool myself.
Only time in its infinite
tide of God’s inscrutable
will will tell.





Tandems. Your camera survives
in your oldest brother’s hands
and your laptop gets a beating
from my own—Lord, I promised
to be succinct—and your pictures
now find a better more durable
wilderness in the book I just
published, sending a copy to
every family member as
this year’s reverie, with
the motto you believed:
Beauty Heals. Heals, I
believe today, because
it endures, being one of
the portals to God we
each possess when we
tune our five senses to
that fine high signal
inside the world which
semaphores You Are Here,
here in this moment
which I will mail to you
on Christmas morning,
posting this poem and its
pictures on your website.

Along with this letter
I send a gift, a picture
of our garden Christmas tree in
full lit glory, those lights
hiding a multitude of faults
(we’ve had to re-set up the
damn thing three times now
after falling over in the wind)
when in darkness it glows.
Hardly anyone in our neighborhood
has lights out this year—probably
can’t afford them, given the
economy—and it’s too bad,
because those Christmas lights
bring a little of silent night skies
down to earth among us,
a light made warmer and
more intimate for the human
spaces we call home.





We sure miss you this year,
even though you were never
home for this holiday.
Miss you as well as all
the others who won’t
be coming home for Christmas,
ever—neighbors, nephews,
old friends, cats, pop singers,
senators, evangelists,
poor kids who got run over,
pretty girls who disappeared,
soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the thousands
who succumbed in an instant
to tsunami and earthaquake,
and a much larger count dying so
slowly, starved of life by
those who would have it all.
Et cetera. No need to litanize;
I simply underscore the lonely
paradoxical vowel inside of the
word pronounced home,
that warm hearth which
is also a hole through which
such lonely cold winds blow
carrying on black wings the
sound of distant surf
whose eternal resound
is inside our own bones.





In our various and scattered
homes, the rest of your family
will get together, each in their
own home-ways: Mom and your sister
and I together in Mom’s
decked-out house on Christmas Eve,
Dad with Fred by the fireplace
looking out on snowy
fields in the hills of Pennsylvania,
brother Will not far from him
with his wife celebrating
in his own home, the one
he’s worked on so hard for years
to create his own thrall of place.
But wherever we will gather,
all of us will be together most
in missing you, Timm O’Cobhthaigh,
united by a moment’s silent awe
and awfulness as we remember
your sleepy face on Christmas Day,
the last kid to rouse at last
and join a merry fray
that’s so far away the sound
of it is dim, almost a white wash
mixed in all I try to hold on to
while your grasp slips ever
further in the tide.