That Day
       

Auden wrote about my brother,
the way no one saw his plane go down.
No image survives, no Kodachrome
or Brownie print, no news flash
or YouTube clip, no time machine
to take me back to April 13, 1953,
his 21st birthday, going up
in the plane he had so recently
purchased, and couldn't wait.
Someone standing alongside his car
at ocean’s edge might have seen him
but looked away, and when he looked
back again the thing was gone,
and he didn't puzzle over how much time
had passed, or where a plane could have
disappeared, around the back
side of a cliff, for example,
like a page had turned and all
the words that came before
were gone, tabula rasa, not even
the remnants of something erased,
palimpsest, a clue, a morsel,
talisman, touchstone,
hand of my brother on my forehead
as I went to sleep.

Tweet

Copyright © 2020 Sharon Olson All rights reserved
from Will There Be Music?
Cherry Grove Collections
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission