Garrett, you are lying right now in a hospital bed in Athens, OH,
and I am at a coffeeshop in Huntington Woods, MI,
named for a butterfly or a king. And time seems to dissolve,
opening or closing like an accordion, like a lover’s knees,
like a season drifting into another as fog through doorways.
For what is time before it is turned into meaning or memory,
what John Ashbery described as the loose untidy meaning,
“simple like a threshing floor”? It is an image of time as it is, lived;
what is lodged in our bones like salt
and appears behind our words as a kind of residue,
what we say behind what we speak,
or what our thoughts show. That is time when I think of you,
constitutive somehow of me, before the narrative grips again.
The time I have spent with you – it is simple,
it lies on the cold hard ground like threshed wheat,
and if you pick up the wheat and hold it to the light
you can see the sunlight piercing the brittleness
of the grainy golden-yellow,
you can see your own hand there, you can say “here I am.”

Do you remember playing in our neighbor’s backyard?
It was always autumn, and Matt’s dog Pookie
was black and shaggy. You could kick up the fallen leaves,
jump into a pile of them, smell the leaves burning,
and the whole time you were behind me, beside me,
and there isn’t a metaphor for that, it doesn’t need one.
Our cheeks were red, our minds whizzed around,
we shouted and laughed. I was alive with you in the world;
therefore I didn’t want, I didn’t lack.
Just to be with you was, is, enough.

I always thought the details of our lives were stupid,
not worth preserving; but then I read a memoir about Detroit, Southfield, West Bloomfield,
and I felt the life of my soul being tugged on,
as if we thirsted always for forms of recognition,
and when we found them we saw our lives as if in a painting,
"through a glass darkly."
Re-cognition, re-seeing, the way Whitman sees,
writing people into the world that Kant would have approved of,
dignified and hearty, full-blooded, proud. To find my voice
by talking to you, doesn’t that make sense?
As if the voice in my mind that speaks to you now
was partly your creation, water dyed the color of you,
the color of me, blurred and immiscible, like a Rothko.

And see, now the poem, in its wrestling with the angel,
has emptied itself out into the world
like a sock turning inside out,
like the costume you wore in kindergarten for alphabet day,
“S” for super socks. I wore cereal boxes for “C."
Mom and Dad safety-pinned the yellow Cheerio boxes
to my (I almost wrote “our”) clothes.

You are my memory, in a sense,
the person I stand closest to. But time passes
like the angel of death over lawns and vacant lots.
The blood in our veins is a kind of history,
like the lights of houses at night, the TV on,
watching Beverly Hills 90210 with Mom on the blue couch
in the living room thirty years ago. We’d fight over the remote."
“Don’t take my place, don’t take my channel changer.”

And the deck outside the large sliding glass door –
do you remember how it smelled out there,
with all those shagbark hickories, their acorns hitting the deck?
The light bounded through the window pane,
and we sat on the couch after Mom made dinner –
Chinese, kugel, tuna casserole, French onion soup
in those brown and white bowls. We’d just sat around
the kitchen table – Dad at the head, Mom to his right,
me next to Mom, you and Jordan across from me.
How many times were we all there together,
and where has that time gone?

It’s inside of me somehow, but I need to speak it to see it,
to remember it. For as I speak to me, I speak to you,
the self in the rock,  “the hum of your valved voice.”
Is that what happens, the memory growing longer,
the life like a form of distance growing shorter,
like light falling down the path at Cranbrook,
taking you to the trees and ponds?
Memory lengthens like light, like a spool of yarn,
as our lives move closer to death.
Out the window, your own twin brother is shouting to you,
and if you shut the window he only gets louder.
So answer me: tell me you are okay.
Every sentence I speak is an address to him,
to you, Garrett; and as I think I thank you,
to find you, my twin brother, my need, my first and forever love,
in a clearing beside the shagbark hickories.