After your funeral I walked, by memory, to the old house,
as if I might somehow find you lingering there,
as if the years had waited all this time, unchanging.
A new one stood in its place -- charming and respectable, freshly
painted, with an impossibly green and manicured lawn.
Nothing you would have recognized. Only the trees
seemed familiar, the old and stately oaks grown older still,
the fan dance of their shadows wavering at my feet.
They would know you, I'm sure, as the lake water would,
as I barely had time to before you were gone.
We are becoming part of the past, dear brother,
a world which we had no idea we were creating as kids;
and it's something I can just about see if I narrow my eyes,
the way a rough sketch hidden beneath a painting
can be seen when held up to a particular kind of light.
Would you mourn this loss with me, I wonder.
Or would you perhaps be grateful, as I am, that no one now
can sleep where we slept, dream where we dreamed;
no one will smoke unfiltered Camels on the slanted roof,
the chilly autumn sunlight looking on in silence.
Those rooms where we laughed, where we fought, talking
long into the night, stand within these walls of words --
every door and window intact, every creak and groan of that
shifting house familiar. It all belongs to us now.
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