08-26-2023, 07:01 PM
Notes for an Elegy
We were three sons of an angry father,
but I came along late and was mostly spared.
Not so much, my oldest brother, Robert.
Our father wanted perfection
and his first born was merely human.
Our mother mourned his childhood
all of her life.
A gay teenager in the 1950s
I can only imagine the hell of his adolescence.
Forced to join the Marines, to make him a man,
he made it through boot camp, then confessed
he would not shoot another human being.
That was the end of his soldiering days.
His homecoming was something out of a Pinter play
from the stories I heard from our sister much later.
From that point on, his was a subterranean life,
sometimes literally. He hid out under our house
when our father was home each weekend,
I could hear his transistor radio playing late at night.
He was there beneath the floor as I lay in my bed.
He would reappear on Monday mornings,
joking with me, as though this were a normal life.
Turning to alcohol and prescription drugs,
he refused to work, his essential revenge on a father
who worshipped the self-made man.
He loved baseball, cats and California, studied the weather
like a poet with broken hands, dreamed of being a bartender.
When destitution overwhelmed him, he came back
as close to home and our mother as he could get.
I was part of a conspiracy to keep him alive,
I did my part and swallowed the confusion.
He was only allowed into our father’s presence
on holidays, a grudging acceptance, always peppered with,
at best, sarcasm, at worst (and the worst always came)
a collapsing tower of rancor, its falling debris
full of shouts and abuse.
He outlived our father,
came home at last to be permanently succored by our mother
until she became helpless and then he was her companion
to the end of her life.
Diagnosed with lung cancer at 70,
he died alone in a shabby rest home in Blanco,
I remember my last sight of him, carrying a worn out suitcase
to my brother Mike’s truck to be transported to his
final destination.
Our fond nickname for him was El Roberto.
His grief was our grief, his life an exemplar
of all that could go wrong in one brief span of existence,
and in these memories I compile only a bare outline
of his martyrdom.
His was a lifelong crucifixion.
Jesus’ suffering never impressed me much
after knowing him for all of my years.
We were three sons of an angry father,
but I came along late and was mostly spared.
Not so much, my oldest brother, Robert.
Our father wanted perfection
and his first born was merely human.
Our mother mourned his childhood
all of her life.
A gay teenager in the 1950s
I can only imagine the hell of his adolescence.
Forced to join the Marines, to make him a man,
he made it through boot camp, then confessed
he would not shoot another human being.
That was the end of his soldiering days.
His homecoming was something out of a Pinter play
from the stories I heard from our sister much later.
From that point on, his was a subterranean life,
sometimes literally. He hid out under our house
when our father was home each weekend,
I could hear his transistor radio playing late at night.
He was there beneath the floor as I lay in my bed.
He would reappear on Monday mornings,
joking with me, as though this were a normal life.
Turning to alcohol and prescription drugs,
he refused to work, his essential revenge on a father
who worshipped the self-made man.
He loved baseball, cats and California, studied the weather
like a poet with broken hands, dreamed of being a bartender.
When destitution overwhelmed him, he came back
as close to home and our mother as he could get.
I was part of a conspiracy to keep him alive,
I did my part and swallowed the confusion.
He was only allowed into our father’s presence
on holidays, a grudging acceptance, always peppered with,
at best, sarcasm, at worst (and the worst always came)
a collapsing tower of rancor, its falling debris
full of shouts and abuse.
He outlived our father,
came home at last to be permanently succored by our mother
until she became helpless and then he was her companion
to the end of her life.
Diagnosed with lung cancer at 70,
he died alone in a shabby rest home in Blanco,
I remember my last sight of him, carrying a worn out suitcase
to my brother Mike’s truck to be transported to his
final destination.
Our fond nickname for him was El Roberto.
His grief was our grief, his life an exemplar
of all that could go wrong in one brief span of existence,
and in these memories I compile only a bare outline
of his martyrdom.
His was a lifelong crucifixion.
Jesus’ suffering never impressed me much
after knowing him for all of my years.