I IMAGINE MY BROTHER AS AN ISLAND
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I imagine my brother as an island: his long, gracile left arm curves to form a harbour with a windbreak of lush flora; the bioluminescent coral of his hair faintly glitters, barely visible beneath the lazuli deeps that break on the reef of his toes, batter calluses to slow erosion; his beach, shallow, more pebble than sand, teems with nocturnal life, diffident fauna that drape themselves in night, creep about for provisions to hide from the day and what the day brings forth, that lack courage enough to run for the beautiful black soil just beyond his palm — the scent of it a taunt to them — that nurtures danger and ambition, shoots sturdy greens upward in the way of nature: ruthless, avaricious, greedy for the same sun, riotous — greens that colonize my brother’s legs, that surround and briefly defer to more humble species of greens — moss, fern, sage, hints of jadeite — in the glade that rolls across my brother’s belly, a place where larger life ventures brave and handsome, but never far from the safety of the thicket, ears up and eyes wide for the other day-walkers as they forage amid the luscious long grasses, the plain of peacock flowers that spangle the clearing floor as it swells and suddenly juts upward to the tree-lined escarpment of his clavicle, there the native skulk of opportunists, the ones that watch and watch and watch then strike and rip and spray green’s complement, forge-red life, onto leaf and frond, to drip, return life to the black soil much as rent flesh releases life to the myriad maws, large and small, that range the length of him, crawl the undergrowth, complete the cycle, retreat with the sun’s wander westward to forest den, to underworld even as others emerge — from the border of the modest beach of sand and pebbles to the barren cliffs of his shoulders — crags above sea spray — or up into the secure chaparral that makes claim to and all but sequesters the highlands of his chin, then even higher as the rich soil asserts itself and black stretches upward to the caldera of his mouth which torrents turns to a mountain pool, an oasis to the seabirds, raucous, truculent, that vie for dominance and respite between their migrations, the victor eager to claim the prize of promontory nose, there to drink and feed, pluck at the meat of my brother’s lifeless eyes, sockets skyward; in the moon-yearning tide he rides with other worthless cargo that form an archipelago of the fortunate ones who will never see the lands west of the land of the dead, and I strain for him, I want to go with him when the strange men with string for hair and their chatter which isn’t real talk of real people come to take him out onto the deck to release him, I tear against their cold black iron, blacker than my skin, and naked but for a blanket of soft cries and delirium in the dark, in the stink, I lay in my own filth where I struggle to call to him, to beg him wait for me, brother, wait for me, but my bonds are too strong, my throat too dry.
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