Deep in this cold dark morning, a summer day from you

 

Today the winds blow hard and cold and they're nearly empty 

of your name, as usual, my lost brother, but even that 

is a presence I reach for, a familiar absence 

of great northern tundras which mail these winds,

hard steppes of permafrost where your echo still resounds 

with all the other loved oneswhose footsteps now fall lighter than snow.

Your voice-I can hardly remember it now, except when winds rake 

the trees outside,when I awaken from a dream, 

when I whisper your name in the shower-

is carried here like a shard of glass in the hold 

of an Edmonton clipper,in this morning's twirling front 

of shattered mirrors, each baring just a single glint 

of someone's smile now faint as starlight.

 

I hear those winds from an inside where it's warm and cozy,
our cat Hugo snoozing wedged to left of me in this chair, his purrs
softened to a stillness not unlike the fragrant paper
of a jasmine's white bloom sprung on blue skies.
The inside memory of you I share here is not of winter,
not cankered in old grief, but of that summer afternoon
you roamed Crater National Park in southern Oregon,
far in that verdant wild you lovcd, camera in one hand
and your lost child's hand in the other, adventuring like
a seven-year-oldon a broom-shaped horse into the
greenest home you knew, secure and happy
in that wilderness where  God's wide arms scooped up
your happy gaze and held it safe and secure in vistas
too broad for any lens to capture,
much less inhabit, though you tried, you tried.
So often you found you beauty's welcome there
that you finally wandered so deeply into it
you never quite returned.

Before you died we went about our dailiness knowing 
you were out there  and seemed happy, which is as much 
as a far-flung family like ours who keep in touch so fleetingly 
can hope for. We didn't know the particulars 
except as you begrudged them, a pile of thisses and thats 
which grew considerably in your last couple of years
when it seemed you wanted to come home, or at least bring 
your far orbit closer to ours. So it isn't all that distance 
but the growing familiarity with you
that I remember, a voice not strange in houses that I know,
a swell guest, reaching out in crisis as when 
our nephew Nick was killed on the roads,
you being a brother and me becoming one back.

 

I've tried to trace your story from the things 

you left behind but so much substance is irretrievable, 

our contact with your friends now lost,

the last of your journals in someone else's storage,

the last of your stories told by all I could surmise.

Whatever substantiated your days-hopes, despairs,

music, worship, love-their daily routine waxed at last 

in your heart and then broke and spilled away 

when the dam couldn't hold them any more,

scattering your living presence on a dark silvery river 

tumbling toward an ocean we can't know yet has 

such semblance in the deep blue lake which filled 

that mountain's crater that you walked the rim of 

on that summer's day, a serene flat surface 

which will not reveal its depths to anyone but God,

all presence, even semblance, lost in the reflection 

of the living day  which remains, hiding what's 

full and thriving and deep beneath the visible.

 

As I thought of your coming anniversary at work 

the other dayI thought how your wilderness images 

allow the eye to find you, inviting us to soak in the breadth 

and depth of a summer's day in southern Oregon,

the ocean you have been subsumed in on its every surface

so blue and happy in bright sunlight, your sense of wonder

still providing that ballast which lifts joy into a smile,

sharing a serenity with the world which survives because you are gone:

 

  

Images now framed and hanging in that simple gallery 

of a seaside chapel which will always bear your name, 

my brother Timm's legacy, the walls covered 

with a psaltery of  sights and sighs - there a waterfall,

here a dahlia in the sun, across from it a dormant volcano 

now all green with a deep lake in its crater, 

the whole of it like a little yellow butterfly

in cupped hands we cannot see, twin gossamers 

of flame bright enough to write the poem by, 

augment enough to read your name,

 

 there in the sand on the shore you left us on this next day

and know the fullness of the heart's huge continent

where winter and summer are a single season, a song

of beauty we can't help but see when we remember you

our mouths opening to pour out the notes

you composed with every time your smiled

to see so much of God in the wild, as if nature were a stick horse

you could gallop on every hour of a perfect day,

free at last, at last. "At last" is what the wind sings at this hour,

a wide-open song of love which no dearth nor death can scour.