Peter Taylor has published two books and three chapbooks of poetry and appeared in journals and anthologies internationally, including Amsterdam Quarterly, Aperçus Literary Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, The Copperfield Review, Descant, Eunoia Review, Grain, The Linnet’s Wings, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry Australia, StepAway Magazine, and Tipton Poetry Journal. He has worked as a printer and bookbinder, medical publisher and institute director. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English and lives in Aurora, Canada.
This poem captures the author’s experience with his brother’s suicide some years ago, and was originally published in Phantom Kangaroo, a now defunct US journal, in 2011.
THIS IS STEPHEN
And if you had ceased that day
I would not have seen you
Here and understood
The intimate cynicism of the world.
Don Coles
I
We all end on a slab somewhere,
open pages from Gray's Anatomy
smelling of ether and formaldehyde,
the final invasion coming too late.
Your body did not wait
for surgeons and accidents,
its pallid strength spiteful
of itself yet calm in its resolution
to remain an enigma,
a bruised print.
Brother, where are you?
II
Time changed you
into ceremonies, kept
the others sane.
My heart shrunk to a fist
with the slow agony
of recognition, vague thud
body makes on body
in the comfortless heat
of our embrace.
From the moment
I entered that room,
until the moment
I exit this,
my visitations between
earth which holds you
and thought
in which you exist,
time
the idea of space
between words.
III
Midnight faces
explode.
The firemen I called
knowing they respond faster,
choir of sirens
waking the neighbourhood.
Helmets, fire coats, boots hunched
in that basement room
wanting to be
anywhere else.
I made them use a respirator
even though rigor mortis
had begun to set in.
Coroner in evening dress,
a piece of confetti on his collar,
instructs the police
to drive my sister and I over
to tell your wife and children.
We buy coffee and doughnuts on the way.
IV
I think of dying every day.
Slow excretion of self,
tiny explosions of
heart, brain, kidneys
waiting to expose the film.
I keep your pictures safe
from the infinite exposure
of the sun. When
I advance the roll,
you disappear.
Last frame:
carrying your ashes
in a box, surprised
how little is left.
V
A cold grimace
all you left to the world
and what to me?
You go off,
a flashcube in my head:
tongue swollen as scream,
face a pale mask
orbiting
my night constellation.
Hand stretches
to touch you
across film, across thought,
tearing illusive
filaments of memory.
In the intimate
sepulchre of existence,
language contaminates
as it creates
the flawed universe
we imagine and inhabit,
turning the print
over and over
in my mind.