From Certain Distances In Space I Still See My Brother

Somewhere mother holds you against her breasts in a Chicago flat-- the war winding down --while she warms a bottle and tests the milk on the tender of her wrist;“you are my sunshine,” she sings.

Somewhere you sit in a quilted coatupon a tricycle in front of a red house,and later still your fastball hisses overhome plate into the strike zone.

Somewhere a man says we all derive from stars,while a holy person declares we will live forever.

You still succor your fractious babies as you pace a midnight floor.

Only just now a distant planet watches you bend to help a studentor soften your embrace to your wife in the utter dark.

Somehow you glide out of a fifth floor hospital room into a painted twilight,into streams of cars and trucks and exhaustas your family holds your emancipated body and rides with you to the edge of life

and somewhere a medical studentpeels back what remains of youto learn the human clockwork.