Poem for my Brother
Brian McCabe
You put the phone down
because silence is understanding
an accident chose you to go close to gone.
You spend the dumb day
at a window of mauve, observe
the mountain move around its clouds
and are not, for a moment, in pain.
Many days pass. Slowly,
but recalled as if in time-lapse—
dusk falling earlier forming shapes
across the room, a rumor of summer,
thunder and grass bent by wind.
Suddenly the days seem so predictable.
At a party, now down to a few
spirals of champagne through your throat,
you want to tell a backstory of rain
you want to offer your cupped hands
to those lovely friends so they may
drink the water. Another silence
falls just like the first
now that winter’s returned for what it is —
fractured air floats in the window,
in light, ghostly in its voltage,
always revealing clearer distance
for us to admire. Like footprints reversed
through the nothing something
conceals itself with; a house recalled
from its steps, the way it fills with light
when you speak (you said farewell
then walked through ache to April).
But the lapse only works if margins
are clear and moments— lived-in, in-turned—
stay brief enough to forget being in.
What you thought you might say
as you looked toward some beyond
no one but you could see, where shadows
converge into where they are
without meaning. What you wanted to say
the dial tone just hummed. Wanting
always seeming toward an away.
As if words are there to begin with.
about the writer
Brian McCabe currently lives in New York City.