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Nested starlings guarded
the sandstone hulk
high-grounded above west park’s greenery.

On a fog-bound saturday
before puddles by the aviary
disappeared in mid-season,
the papers pronounced his brother
dead by asphyxiation;
a scotch-on-the-rocks life.

Tube-draped, medics
molded him into a science project
while the hills around the hospital
woke to a silence not felt since dresden.

Coffee-steam smoked
the windows on the falstaff floor.
He drank four cups before the nurses,
capped like catherine of siena,
brought him requisition forms
and well-intentioned sadness.

He buried his brother
hours later in gabriel’s shadow.
On the kneelers’ tarp
around the wet wound,
a hired priest cantored latin
lines guaranteed to save-a-soul.

Cables crissed the branches overhead.
A grave-digger spliced
scrabble stones in the topsoil.
Sweat beads crowned
his forehead, mud-smudged
and wrinkled from decades
hoisting the hulls
of financiers and jitney drivers.

Their eyes met and dragging his shovel,
the caretaker brought the brother’s
keeper a tin flask.
After shared stories and downcast
dirt-kicking ‘guess-I’ll-go-nows’,
both christened safe passage.

2nd Year Medicine

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