Where is he?

What?  How long have they been looking? Have you all been sitting here like this the entire time?

You mean none of you went to look for him? 

who has, who has  been searching the fields and the edges of the marshes for hours, with sirens and with dogs,  who has  been combing the thickets and dredging the muck of the entangled cattails ...

You are sitting here then because you know he is dead. What difference does that make? 

he went out riding on a horse, no one knew where he was going, or why he went riding in the direction that he did, he was on the wrong horse, he was on a horse named messenger, he had his weapons and his shield and his armor and he went riding past the small and squalid yards and the ramshackle houses and crossed the intersections and stopped for nothing

What difference does death make to the heart's affections?

some stranger cutting the weeds in his field and stacking them  into a bonfire to be burnt saw him go riding by and was so struck by the strange sight of a man arrayed in armor riding by that he looked up from the smoke with his eyes stinging-how acrid those weeds are in the burning, how a flame touched to them catches in the wind and races into a hot conflagration 

You entrusted his fate to strangers 

everyone is burning their fields, but only one man noticed him, and said that the man who rode by seemed to be scanning the horizon, as if expecting to see something there, as if trying to see some landmark, some sign for the direction in which he was going

and his body to dogs, 

a messenger of some disaster

or are you waiting for him to come home? thinking that if you sit here long enough, that you will dream him walking back into the door,  with that crooked grin at  perhaps he was riding home,  in the direction where he thought home was,

he was  headed into the snow, but the man who was burning his fields said he was riding, purposefully, like someone who knows where he is going,  a strange sight, a man in all that gear riding a horse as if going to war

What does it matter that he was on the wrong horse, that he rode away on the wrong horse?

one's always riding into death on the wrong horse, 

confused  like our father that day I ran into him by accident in the hospital, I was waiting with someone else for someone else, and there he was, my father, his face the color of lint asking a stranger which way should he go?  I went up to him, he kept saying, he had to get back to where he was in the beginning

He must not have known, the other man said, that when he rode over that hill that the hill was the roof of my house, I designed it myself, I built it myself, a house buried in the side of a hill with a roof made of earth and grass, I wouldn't have guessed that a horse's hoof would go through the roof, plunging through the layers of rock into the interior of my house

What do you mean? 

so strange, the other man said, to be sitting in your living room or in some room of your house and hear the noise and the crumbling of the ceiling and look up and see a horse's leg, up to the knee, that trimmed but unshod hoof flailing from the ceiling

You thought we were all happy?

war in this house, war in our blood,  war in our heads, in the neural net and the nerve endings, in the brain's grey dream, that terrible root of discord and division, it all begins here in the seed of the sperm, in the eye of the ovum, in that terrible war of mother and father, the children divided like spoils among them

Oh, yes,  I remember that, he was little playing with our sister out in the grass and you pointed them out as the very image of peace, the very image of happiness, 

how bright they are, their heads the color of sunlight, how peaceful playing quietly

Oh, I know, you didn't mean it. You've never meant anything.

though it was all war by stealth, by quiet, by evasion, by the obedient smile, for they were plotting among the grasses, distributing the wealth and gain of the game as ruthlessly as any tyrant and perhaps more so, colluding,  just the two of them, just the few of them, smiling, in the enchanted circle of exclusion, no one there to break the lie, to make the war apparent 

Though I always heard it too as an admonition to me, always that reproach for being the dark one, the one dragging  your gaze back to the dark, all those fissures in it

as long as the lie was unbroken, the shredded papers and flesh hidden in the grass 

Yes, I remember, you said the hail could kill him, that if it hit him on the temple or the soft spot of his head, he would die, so I was running and running, trying to keep him from the hail, you thought it was funny, my panic when the tiny wagon got stuck on the curb, and I wasn't big enough to lift it over,  I thought you had said I would kill him,  you gave me the weight of his life

the storm ignored upon the horizon, the hail falling out of the sky, into all the soft spots of one's being, someone else's weight

Yes, I know you didn't mean it. You never do. I'm sorry to remind you of it.

waiting and waiting in one room, a group of mourners for the arrival of the corpse

How could you think we were all always so happy? 

into the fields of course, wherever he is, follow the thread of the body, the thread of my grief, my mouth that used to call him "little bruder" will call out to him in my breath, without words, and his corpse, without words, will answer

I don't care if it is a rule, 

a proper hour for hello and good-bye, that particular moment when the slaughtered and baked bird must be brought to the table, when we all must arrive and sit down in our usual places, a banquet of death, spitting out always the bones and the flavor, 

I seem strange to you? Does any of this seem not strange? 

who has, who made up this rule, no one, everyone,  the phantoms of the mind issue out of some commingling of the many in desire and in fear and clench flesh in their iron hands, until the body is wound up in barbed wire, and even the mind cannot move, but like shackled feet, cannot move more than an inch to left or right 

Well, I'm sorry to disturb the banquet of his death

he had to die, didn't he?  for if he hadn't, what lived in him might have killed us all, probably at some great banquet, several pheasants that he had killed sitting on the table in all their golden crackling flesh, while you sat there, smiling, so glad at the gathering of us all at one table, so happy, being all so happy

that's the last thing, he said to me, you know, that we should all get together, on some great occasion, and have a new beginning

this is it
 

oh don't look at me like that, you always have that naked face, like a plucked bird, all raw pale skin and the stubs where the feathers were

the new beginning that he imagined, 

what law, whose law, without speaking, without a word, can come up with a rule, it's like a phantom that emanates from just sitting together, some marsh fire or swamp gas emanating from the rotting weeds, the fallen stalks of the cattails decomposing into the thick sludge, how is it that you all know it without speaking, and I who am faulted for speaking can never know it?

unspoken, yes, such laws are always unspoken

Oh, he knew those laws, he has probably died making one. 

don't let my family see me like this

no, I don't think he was riding away, he was riding toward,  how happy he was 

had bruised all the soft spots in him, so he went out riding toward something else:

No, I'm not trying to make you feel bad. 

all my life does seem like the gloss the living paint on the face of the dead

Yes, I know I say terrible things 

wasn't he already three days dead, wasn't he lying on the grass looking up at the sun and seeing it as an omen, wasn't he shouting at strangers in the street, wasn't he muttering to himself as he sat in the yard and pulled the grass up with his fingers, wasn't he always at war, wasn't he the only casualty he ever slew

No, I don't want to make you feel bad.

every family must have one terrible child, the one who says all the things that the others will not say, being so attached as they are to that happiness in which they think to bathe and drench themselves, happiness is blind, 

Yes, we were happy, we were always happy, I'm going to look for him, I'll say whatever you want, just let me go, since the lie of whatever I must tell you is forgiven in the truth of my going

in your twilight with your ghost of the rule enlivening the room, sit here with your emptiness of being in the fullness of bodily grief, neither cry nor cry out, make these minor adjustments of the curtains, sweep the dust from the fields that he brought in on his boots out of your house, discuss in endless detail the crooked wall that he built and how the stones that he meant to place in order never met your specifications, say angrily how you never took his shit, how you refused to put up with it, how you told him so on many occasions,  how you made him speechless with your certainties until he could neither cry nor cry out and all that warred within him became a mute haze of unpredictable acts, riding into the distance

What? No, I don't want some more tea. 

 I should never have let you interrupt those quarrels I was always having with him, for the sake of peace, for the sake of happiness, so that instead we could have the peace and quiet you wanted, full of the minutia of our latest task, the endless law of shopping and dinners, I should never have let you silence the war between him and me, it was the truth of the war within us, the war between us, and it was the only embrace we had left to give one another,  struggling in the grip of words, 

No, I'm not arguing, I'm just going, 

what rule, what law can keep me from the corpse of my brother, what love can turn away from a beloved face, 

Yes,  you can stay here, they'll bring his corpse out to you sooner or later

though kissed by flies.
 

****

Muttering to herself 

the edge of the water, to the edge of the water and lie down in the grasses, in that circle like the shape of a wheel crushed into the grass

he could have been me

I could have been him

a swamp that looked just like this one, more cattails, a sea of them in the black muck, so thick that it would suck the boots off one's feet, not as much thicket, 

what? yes, I can ...

sometimes the only thing left to the living is to identify the dead

why did he go down that other road? is it ever the other road? where was he going? he probably thought he was riding into more life, more home, a common mistake

yes, everyone else is back at the house

but no one is truly there,  it's a house full of ghosts, the ghosts of this body
lying here, this body which alone is real

the injury to the horse, the animal in oneself, all that blood guilt, it was that terrible moment of recognition when we realized who our parents were and what they were to each other and what that made us, misbegotten, zygotes of the impossible, only four of us, no one else, no other relative, no friend, no family, a house of four children, that terrible dream of happiness casting its spell upon the seed of the sperm and the eye of the ovum

why can't I touch him?

to say my brother, my brother...

what crime is his body evidence of? it's so hard to know where it began, its tendrils reaching and intertwining through our nerve endings, into the grey corrugations of our brains,  the rule of the fathers, the law of war, its rootlets and saplings reaching into the thick black murk of the human skull

no I don't think anyone murdered him

 it's hard to say who, there are so many, it goes so far back, there were those who showed him when he was a child images and practices of war until he trembled and cried his way out of girlishness, there was the father who spit him out of himself, in his body and then in his words, there was his mother who gave birth to him out of the abandoned bitterness of herself, there was that ring of boys, so golden and laughing in the light, who circled him and pummeled him until he became harder than any fist, there were all the fists in the fields and in the streets and in someone's house, there was one woman, there is always only one woman, 

how long are you going to let him lie there like this? 

his hand is still reaching toward his punctured chest where the blood has already clotted but it is as if the hand still remembered and were still trying to comfort him for what it had done

yes, he had been troubled for a long time

they said  he seemed to be getting better, someone said he seemed happy yesterday

no, no one wanted to kill him, 

he was the only one who wished he was dead
 

**

once I climbed into an open grave, I used to walk through the cemetery talking to myself, in a cloud of feelings and words, because I thought the dead could hear me as the living could not, and one day I came upon an open grave, its sides so sheered from the cold, the severed roots of nearby trees like white knots of muscle in it, that it looked as if the earth in the shape of a coffin had been cut out in one gesture and lifted out, leaving this rectangular descent, though I could see this was not so, because the earth was heaped up in mounds beside the grave, at a respectful distance, and I wondered what the view from death was like, so I jumped in. And I could see nothing but the sheered sides, it was winter, the ground was frozen and my fingers pressed against it left no impression, it was a sleek flank of impenetrable substance, and chilling to the touch, there was nowhere to look but up, into the sky, except the sky was sheered too, without horizon, without the intricate laceries of the trees, the interruptions of the buildings, that so frame the sky and give its expanse that sense of depth and endlessness, as eyes may, being framed by a face, give us that sense of unplumbed depths, of an infinitude of light gazed into or gazing back, so the sky was flat, a rectangular shape of blue, without depth or horizon, the eye could not swim in it or dream, it was like the eye of a god, impenetrable and without variation,  just a blue rectangle, and I knew even the heavens are cut in the shape of a coffin, but I couldn't bear that gaze very long, I became impatient, and wanted to get out, but I realized that I did not know how to get out of the depth into which I had descended, the walls were so frozen that they allowed for no grip or purchase of toe or finger, my hands slipped from their sides as they have fallen away from the chill cold of someone's expressions, as a child reaching to someone's leg may feel such a resistant in the flesh, that her hands slide away, I was sliding away from the earth, into the earth, into its coldness, and I became afraid, panicked almost, that I would not be able to get out, what would the mourners think when they came to bury the corpse that was meant for this grave and found another, strange and uninvited, lying within it?  only the place where a shovel had slipped and made a  gouge allowed me to slip one toe into it and then I scrambled out, only the wound allows one  to escape, its howl propels the body back into the air, as a child howls out of the womb, no punishment beyond what it sees and knows