be anew

my brother, in the prolonged lead-up
to his death, photographed a rose,
a rose my mother planted in a narrow
garden at my parent's house, where
he'd come to live out the remainder
of his days

i would sit with him over nights, to
be a vigilant watchmen of his frail
meanderings, a guard against a sudden
stuttering fall

that morning, the morning of the rose,
we sat together on a bench on a porch,
and he leaned into me to show me his
photograph

"it's a venus flytrap," he said, and
i looked at it once more, thinking
he was being queer with me. even on a
slope toward death he was alive with
mischief

squinting, i tried to see his plant;
i tried to morph the tender pedals of the
rose into the spiny wings of the fly trap,
but failed. my vision was fixed

despite all, i could not
release from my mind the shape of it
being a rose

his brain was on fire, of course,
and i knew this - the cancer was a
restless bulb, while the drugs were
a different kind of thief
and together they had him adrift

i marveled - just briefly, and not
for the first time - at my brother's
reduction at the hands of fortune

how insignificant had the flowers in
gardens or the trees in forests or the shape
of the sound of my children's voices
had become for me

but for a man in the wake of a crushing
wave, he was now cast out and had no power
or time to make it back to everything
he'd easily dismissed in life

"it's beautiful," i assured him and
he put the photo away - it was on his
cell phone - and then told me he
couldn't talk about his daughters
"not right now"

i'd not asked, but his infected mind
had leaped from the photo to some
darker place, which was common,
and he now cried in a slump

why do we arrive at all our different
places anew, demanding that this at last
was the best, and now permanent, station?

for nothing in nature informs us of
this: the sea, the wind, the sands,
they never affix themselves forever
and their flux toward death and into renewal
is how they live

yet we cry out from our fears and
from our loathing of change and
we make blasphemers of our friends
who question our new sacred, firm place

he used to never sleep, in those last months,
from fear that closing his eyes would,
at last, tear him away from us

but after this, after the picture of the rose,
he began to sleep more, and i dismissed
it as the natural progression of the evil
that had consumed his brain

i just now recalled the rose and
how he'd seen something different,
two years since he slipped into
a new night, quiet as a closing curtain

but i see his venus flytrap now, from a new
vision: of a man resisting the solid
place onto which we all insist on staking ourselves;
a man wanting for release

he was - perhaps unconsciously from
his illness - reforming his perspective,
loosening the grasp that allowed him
to float away, renewed