Air

Fifteen years ago today, my brother Thomas died of ARDS (Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome) in an intensive care unit of Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. The day before, in a hospital hallway, my mother had told me what she’d heard on the news: that a powerful hurricane was headed right for the mouth of the Mississippi, and that it was named Katrina.

My poem “Breath,” which I eventually wrote about this loss, talks about “some awful / symmetry” in certain intersections of events. It’s hard today not to think of a similar symmetry, a chiming, as the world tries so hard to breathe while hurricanes stew in the Gulf. Each of my grown children has said to me today in different phrasing that Uncle Thomas would have plenty to say about what’s going on right now. Boy, is that the truth.

There’s no one photograph that captures his vigor, his brusque and out-of-left-field humor, his deep caring for his family and animals, books and music, progressive politics, American ideals, and the Louisiana outdoors. I don’t know why we didn’t take more pictures of him; for one thing, we didn’t have smartphones and weren’t so picture-happy, but also, to be around him was to be caught up in a vortex of his energy, his activity, whatever he was reacting to/doing/fixing/laughing at/roaring at in the moment, and rather than stand and snap a photo you were more likely just to be swept along. Likewise, there’s no brief way to do justice to his personality. It would come closer to being adequately described in a night-long wake with people who knew him telling stories and fooling around on guitars.

When Thomas first died, I didn’t know how I was going to be able to wake up every morning in a world that he wasn’t in. But somehow I did, day after day, we all did, and now it’s been fifteen years. As poet Marie Howe says in “What the Living Do,” “I'm speechless: / I am living. I remember you.”

Here again is “Breath”—first published in The Carolina Quarterly and later in my collection The Wheel of Light (Brickhouse Books, 2015).

Breath

It was only coincidence that you died

in New Orleans, two days before the great storm.

You’d been airlifted

to a place that would help you respire. Respire—

air

lifted

what beautiful words. Your lungs

had quit working. Up and down

the rows of the orchards you’d driven, driven

your tractor and walked, as if walking

on air—the thick moist air that soon

you wouldn’t be able to breathe, into which you would rise

—inspecting the foliage, teeth clamped

around a cigar.

Your trees ate light:

made leaves and budded, filled out

like your daughters, approaching

the slope of their prime. How happy

you’d been, that spring, applying the mists and fogs, to combat

this fungus, that blight. Smoking. Breathing. Eyeing

the long, ordered rows. Until

like a mild cold it started, a virus. Something wrong

with you who had never been sick, who’d

been to the hospital only for accidents—slip

of the grafting knife, lunge

by the dog in labor—that left you short

two fingertips and with a twist

to your smile, but breathing How

could it be that now

you had to be flown

over swamps and levees

to the tower of intensive care? To this place that would save you.

Mom said to me, “The hospital where

you were born.” Where I took my first breath.

“I know,” I said. “Stop it, stop. That’s just

a coincidence.”

Dreading

some awful

symmetry.

Miscellanies