ELEGY FOR MY BROTHER was first published in the Southern Poetry Review, and subsequently it was included in Cathy’s first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, which won the Texas Tech University Press First Book Award (now called the Walt McDonald Award) and was published by them in 1992. This book was reprinted and a trade paperback by Iris Press in 1997 and is currently available fron Iris and elsewhere.

ELEGY FOR MY BROTHER

You joked it was devil's shoestring
that you sowed,
not oats,
but poppy, larkspur, clover,
your pollen floating everywhere
to towns so far away they had no names,
to a war where you died
though they sent you back alive,
the brilliant map of your body
the work of skilled cartographers
whose faces you never even saw.

Hot.
It was so hot there,
you awakened one night screaming,
the ice I brought to cool your fever
melting into rivulets
on your brow
until the cold transferred us laughing

to the summer
Mama's Frigidaire blew up
and every morning
you were sent for ice
from the plant across the creek,
that one huge block a day
you dared bring back by way of stepping stone.

I watched from the edge of our back yard
as you emerged from the mouth
of the ice plant

lugging that heavy block
like a sleeping child,

how once on the curved, slick surfaces
you balanced like a circus star
above the creek's shallow death
pretending now and then to lose your footing
until I wept and laughed at the water's edge
then cheered you on to safety.

The fever eased. You slept
and dreamt, as I imagined,
your scattered seed children:
what strange countries' meadows
they frolic through
the wreaths of poppy, larkspur,
devil's shoestring
circling their delicate heads;

what waters they linger towards
like rats after some faint note
that in another time and place
might have come close to music;

what darkness they tightrope over,
bearing your heart inside them
like ice.

© Cathy Smith Bowers, 1990, 1992.