The Night Before I Leave Home

my brother gets out of bed at three, having lain down

only a few hours before, and pulls on his jeans, and stubs his toe

     on the doorjamb,

and cuts himself, just a scratch, reaching too fast in the dark

for wallet and keys—and the weapon? A bill, probably.

He goes out under the huge sky, out of the small house

and beyond, fields upon fields, where as children we played

     hide-and-seek and tag

and all those games, I miss them. All we imagined. In my

     brother’s mind

the fuzziness of the awakened-too-soon after not-enough-sleep

and the resentful calm that comes

when doing your duty to those you love,

to whom you could not

do otherwise.

He drives too fast, as always, braking hard when he

     finally arrives

at the meadow my car slid into before it slid

into an oak

where a whitetail hangs, strung

by its hind legs to drain the slit throat.

It takes more time than I expected

for death to be over,

I tell my brother. And he, a hunter, says, Yeah

in the tone that means, Of course.

And years later I have the same voice

when he calls at 4:17 a.m. and I knock the phone off the bed,

answering almost upside-down, stretched toward him.

His pain then, I lived for it, I realize now.

Not for its existence, but to quiet with my words.

I had left so long ago. I had left.

The doe’s eyeshine keeps us company. We joke

about our dead new friend. We share a half-drunk fifth

of Jim Beam tugged from under the passenger seat.

By the time the tow truck rumbles up, it’s well into dawn.

We are giddy—like children

who have played a game so wholly they have forgotten

the rules of the real world, and naturally

don’t want to remember. My brother turns to me near sunrise

to ask, What do you think he’s doing? Right now?

And I spin a story of a father

waking to polish his teeth, spit blood

into the eye of a porcelain bowl, wash a face like my brother’s.

That was a game, yes, us seeking the man

he was when not hurting us one and then the other,

and then the game ended

as children’s games do, when authority says

it’s time to disperse,

when the other gets on a plane, and one is left.