Postcards My Brother Used to Send

I found the poetry and postcards
my brother sent me,
buried in a shoebox beneath the calm,
yellow chill of antiquity.

The skyscrapers and boardwalks
he called home rise to view
in my palm-torn and wrinkled
panoramic sights of city streets:

Castro, Christopher, Bleecker, Duval-
“Full,” he wrote, “yet so empty.”
I shuffle his happiness
in my hands: still-lifes

of his errant ways scattered before me.
I see him smile in each.
He never called home.
They adored him in neon-drenched cities

where, I know, men dance on pillars
in pink light, tight underwear,
laserbeams growing
into their chests and torsos.

His poetry confused me: childhood,
masturbation, men together in bed.
Now his life is a blur on my carpet:
“Sis, you must come to New Orleans-

You’d love the French Quarter!”
I live an ordinary life here in Iowa
and my children will grow up
never knowing their lost uncle, going

slowly as I scrub the drawers of my hutch:
a complete resurrection and burial at once
for the boy whose peregrinations
became his family. The last postcard

from Boston, barely legible, inscribed:
“It was the only life I had.”-melodramatic,
a quote from a poem. The wake is tomorrow,
someplace Northeast, his remains blown

on winter snow, freezing until Spring
where he’ll grow into daffodils and azaleas,
second life, true beauty, reaching toward
the sun in daylight and the moon, safe moon.

Jeffery Walt
Winooski, VT