With My Brother
Untying ropes from flagpoles.
Motionless, reluctant, unchanged
even by the stillness of flags
in a century of ordinary flags. How
I love to ride with my brother
even if below our joy persists
a collective hush and something
like Lake Michigan in which we know
the day is long and the once true things
still are: What will I throw my weight
into today? Where are the sour
among the sweet cherries? The salt
from sweat makes our skin stick
but my brother is full of privilege
and things that comfort, of family
anger, that old-house feeling.
Copyright © 2015 by Robert Ostrom. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 4, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I won’t write what this poem is about, and I don’t know what inspired it, so I'll tell you a memory: During my move from California to New York City, while driving alone and without cruise control, I kept hearing news about a boy who was lost on a raft in Lake Michigan. At first, through Nevada and Utah, the reports were rare (storms had halted the search), but as I drove farther east (Iowa, Illinois), news of the boy became more frequent. Visibility on the highway was bad, but then in Indiana, where Interstate 80 runs concurrent with 94, the fog broke, and suddenly I saw Lake Michigan outside my window. And for what couldn’t have been more than half an hour, I rode alongside that lake where the boy was still lost.”
—Robert Ostrom
Robert Ostrom
Robert Ostrom is the author of Ritual and Bit (Saturnalia Books, 2016)