28 NOVEMBER, Polish Cemetery, Saltines

On my morning walk, elections over, another day

of contagion, I take the usual route through factory

streets I own by love alone; at the corner a man in

a white pickup pulls up a few election signs, throws

them in his truck, leaving behind a ragged row of

tipping others, looking like drunken sailors filing back

to the right port and pier, wrong ship. I move on, shuffling

a block through brick-red leaves scattered over sidewalks,

then head up the hill and circle the perimeter of the Polish

cemetery, catch sight of a woman 40-ish I’ve seen there

before, today sitting in the grass, serene, a cup of coffee

in her hand, two headstones at her feet (mother and father,

I’d guess), letting her thoughts slip away to the two by

her feet, who catch every soft and tender wind-drift word,

maybe……off to thoughts shuttling me back to my “odd”

oldest brother camping graveside that cold night after we’d

buried our youngest brother taken by AIDS, the most of his

craggy soul he could give given his deep distrust of spoken

mourning rites.  (Oh, it’s hard in later years to hold back

the waters of retrospection.)  I’m home again, some household

chores to do, done, soon brings me to lunch, a bowl of soup

with saltines, saltines, the salty crackers around forever –

skittering me away to……oh yes, to Brady, we’re kids; he

shares a handful of them under the backyard pine, two of us

buzzing about Mays and Mantle, code rings in cereal boxes,

the Three Stooges’ latest hijinks – then, three decades pass

to me visiting family back home:  privet hedges overgrown

and sickly, Brady pacing the pot-holed road, this other Brady

with the burst blood vessel in his head that surgeons had

mended though ended the short life he’d known, of wife and

two kids and everything else, now a boy-man in his father’s

care, drop-in guest at my family’s open door, just Brady and

me again as he tells his story rapid-fire, eyes fierce, mission

fiery, clutching my shirt in a tight fist once to make it clear

he’d defy all odds by sheer mental strength, pure willpower,

blurted through spit and drool more from grit for the fight

within than powerful straightjacket meds taken. After lunch

I sit out on the front porch to read, to escape, and a few pages

into it I look up to see the neighbor’s rosebush and……….