Dear Henry,

Henry Thoreau who has been at his fathers since the death of his brother was ill & threatened with lockjaw! his brothers disease.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

Like Achilles smearing his face with soot,

shearing his hair at the news of Patroclus’s death,

you, too, took a step to the world of the dead

when your brother died. Bewildered,

your jaw and limbs stiffened with his.

Then it ended—like floodwaters, it subsided.

You were alive. His memory, a bright

vein of quartz looping through granite,

a glinting diagonal, unsullied and intact

within you. Oblique, flashing—

you leapt

the Emersons’ back stairs, two at a time,

rat-a-tat of a stick on a railing, children

like capes in your wake, you found the first

huckleberries, tamed the woodchuck. Borrowed

the ax, built the cabin, played your brother’s flute.

You drew the oars, then let them go.

Dear invisible, dear true,

with every endeavor, you held him close.

You swallowed the long winter—

and his lost vigor flew through you.