“You remember him as he was, so it is up to you,
to remind the others,” the social worker tells me,
which I take to mean, I have to remember
that there were nights in Florida where the sky
shattered open like a thirteenth century Ming vase,
the silver energy of the troposphere cracking through
into the visible. Lightning is as hot as the sun, they say.
Better to take shelter. I tried to hold him back,
but my brother would run, open-armed
into the dangerous, shouting at the nothing
trembling up there, daring it to annihilate him.
He once told me, “One day, you’re going to fall
off a cliff and get impaled on a tree.
The vultures will eat your face, erasing every feature,
and the bees will sip at your eyes until you become
the nothing you were all along.”
Well, he was always the nihilist,
even before he diminished into a thought
so slow he couldn’t get the word “nothing” out.
Quantum physicist set the mass of particles to zero
in order for the equations to exhibit perfect symmetry.
Nothing is wasted or lost. My brother said he imagined
himself not mattering. That is, he saw himself as not
existing outside of the trouble of having a body,
as if he wished he could be pure spin,
pure energy. He shows me the bottle
of new medicine. It gives him bad dreams.
In them, we’re all forced to go on living
without words or faces. I tell him he looks better.
Later, I tell the social worker that it was like someone being
brought back from the dead. What I really mean,
is that the stranger has disappeared and brought back
the sweet man who once told me that the world was
a complete accident. Tonight a man in Switzerland
presses his fingers to the super solenoid and matter
trembles through him. In a field, in the shadow
of the Matterhorn, a kind man shovels manure
into a hole. My brother wants me to be a mother to him,
but I’m no mother. Someday, my brother will leave
his house and he’ll tell me that everything mattered
until what mattered to him didn’t and I’ll wonder
who he is who comes forth, uncanny stranger,
who passed through the fire of chemicals, alive again.