My Brother's Mirror
by Donald Platt

At eight years old my brother born with Down syndrome
liked to shuffle
down the sidewalk holding our mother's hand mirror

in which he'd watch
what was happening behind him. What did he see so long ago?
Me on a butterfly-handlebarred

bike, which he would never learn to ride, about to run him down,
shouting, "Look out,
slow poke! Make way, bird brain! Think quick, fat tick!"

I would swerve
around him at the last moment. He gazed back at me with blank
cow eyes and couldn't

speak. He warbled like a sparrow, drooled, and went on
looking
in his mirror. Did he see the wind shake the lilacs

by our neighbor's hedge
back and forth like handbells? They kept ringing out their sweet
invisible scent.

Peals of petals fell to the ground. "Look harder, Michael,"
I want to tell him now.
"Your namesake is an archangel. Do you see Kathy, our beautiful

babysitter, who will
kill herself years later with sleeping pills, waving her white dishtowel
to call us home

to supper?" She once caught me lying on the floor and trying
to look up the dark folds
of her schoolgirl's wool skirt and slapped me. But don't we all

walk forward, gazing backward
over our shoulders at the future coming at us from the past like a hit-and-run
driver? Michael,

God's idiot angel, I see in your mirror our father
yanking out
the plugs of all the TVs blaring the evening news

on his nursing home's
locked ward for the demented. He hates the noise, the CNN reporters
in Bam, Iran,

covering yesterday's earthquake, 6.6 on the Richter scale,
twelve seconds,
twenty-five thousand dead, thousands more buried alive

beneath the rubble.
The aftershocks continue. We get live footage of a woman in a purple
shawl, sifting

through her gold-ringed fingers the crumbled concrete
of what were once
the blue-tiled walls of her house. She wails and keeps on

digging.
This morning I dreamed that I was building an arch
from pieces of charred

brick I'd found in that debris. It was complete except for
the keystone,
but no brick would fit. What I needed

was our father
to put his splayed fingers into the fresh mortar where the keystone
should have gone

and leave his handprints there, so I might put my palms to his.
Brother, I held your hand
for the first time last winter. Your fingers were warm,

rubbery.
The skin on the back of your hands was rough and chapped.
They are the same fingers

that weave placemats from blue wool yarn every day,
slowly passing
the shuttle over and under the warp, its strands stretched tight

as the strings of a harp.
It's a silent slow music you make. It takes you
weeks to weave

a single placemat. Brother, you dropped the hand mirror.
It cracked, but didn't
shatter. It broke the seamless sky into countless

jagged splinters,
but still holds the aspen's trembling leaves, the lilacs, you and me,
all passing things.

****************************************************

This poem was in my email this morning from poem-a-day
from poets.org. It didn't format correctly, but one does not
necessarily have to see it in the format the writer intended
to appreciate this poem. I often wonder why some writers
choose to weave their words in and out, not flush with the margin.
I'm not sure I always get the effect they are striving for, or
feel at times that it's a gimmicky kind of thing to format a poem
a particular way for no reason I can ascertain. Jorie Graham
comes to mind. This one definitely looks and reads better
when in the correct format, but I don't know how to get it
that way.

Lauren and Jon just left. Wes still in Lexington.

It's very cool outside. And sunny. A perfect day to work in the
yard, and I have much to do in the yard, but I don't feel like
doing anything.

Slept poorly, as usual, last night and feel very fatigued. Again,
the sleep apnea (which I assume I have) makes for a poor
night of sleep. Today, my nose is runny, but I don't feel sick.
Weird pains in my legs and hips (As is so often case at night),
but they feel ok now. I have to wonder if everyone feels odd
little things in their bodies every day, or if it's just me and my
focus on me. It's like the heart palpitations and the arrythmia.
I feel them, but there are other people I know who have them
who tell me they never really know they are having them.
They tell me the arrythmia or palpitation is discovered by their
doctor at a routine exam. I can't imagine not feeling it.

Creeps me out to be lying on my side and hear my heart
beating, drumming in my ears. Too much me thinking
about me.

Jon, Lauren, & I had this for breakfast this morning:

*cantalope, kiwi, and strawberry fruit salad with vanilla
yogurt as a dip
*ham
*scrambled eggs with hot sauce, scallions, and Monterey jack cheese
*O'Brien potatoes

Full, but not too full.

I think I'll go brush my teeth, wash my face, read for a little
while and then try to go work in the yard. I have lillies
and sedum to plant. I need to mow and weedeat. And I need
to weed.

My herb garden has just grown out of control. The oregano
has taken over everything. Maybe I'll work on it a little today.

Molly's pillow. Gotta wash it.

Now.