TRUE HISTORY OF CLOTH

The kind you want is light like birds like pails of cotton like weight. Air-filled and arid. Not chamois or wool. Use it to scrub your brother down when he returns blue and from frostbite. Use it to stem the trickle that is blood that is your blood coming from his arm that is your arm holding the stem to the leak in his skin that is skin like your skin that comes from the heart right down his side.

This is your element. You are Molybdenum. You are tender like theory. You know enough about cold not to run a too-hot bath for him not to jolt them too hard. You know how to give the limbs their best shot at revision at coming back. There are rules for getting over grief like this. This is a cause a spur a bulk in a backpack. Sheep hearts and onions boiled for days until they resemble one another. Until they go soft and atrophy. So soup.

Here is how to make that soup. Here is how to make it so it won't go bad like love so it won't go antiseptic. You left to go in snow in February. This is a regret. I hold you like I would hold straw. Like magic comes in bottles and is always smoky and unbelievable. Smoke comes out of your garden's remains out of the remains of the summer out of the compost pile.

How to weave cornhusks into hoods. This is not a summary. This is all of the event like a bulb left in the ground waiting for spring to rebirth. Your brother once had limbs. At least that's what you suspect. Your memory is not renewable like books. What it doesn't tell you is all you need to know.

If he had words to handle, or hands to juggle baubles or slide the wooden panel back that hides your mother after death, he could be the revealer, the revenant, the red one.

As it is you gauze his stumps when they are blue and sometimes they spring leaks like springs or stigmata.

You hold that gauze to the missing bicep.

You hold it there like you were a coach, drunk and red and hot.

   First published in Meridian