Today's poem is by Rhett Iseman Trull

Music Box
       

When I let myself in, my brother is singing, up
in his room where he thinks he's alone. As if
to a safe unlocking, I tune my ear, as if now might be revealed
secrets known only to the pinball wizard, jack sprung
from a box, and carousel ponies the moment the ride
switches on. All summer, he's hidden
his voice, no matter how I begged for
just one song. Is his refusal
vengeance for that hide-and-seek, long ago,
when I let the neighbor girls convince me
to abdicate my role as It, though Jim alone remained to find
and would remain, tucked behind the holly,
as its leaves performed their cruelty on his skin
and the sun dropped toward the spiny curtain
of the trees and his sister was not coming, was not even looking, was
in the basement watching MTV, trying to be like the older girls.
I wish he'd remember instead how we found each other
other times, when storms would out the lights
or the algae eater we loved—strange against the glass—
went belly up in the greening tank; or how, when he was little
and wanted it opened and closed, opened and closed, I'd
bring my music box down from the high shelf,
though I feared he might break it.

More likely, he remembers his first solo, his
Winthrop who'd barely speak until that wagon with its
promised trumpet was on its way, his opening night, night I ran
from the theater, disappeared again, might have been
thinking suicide for all he knew, couldn't explain
those dark halls inside me lit by music. Is he, too,
unable to separate the two events, the two of us?
Or does he think of me at all anymore? And
which is worse? A month from now,
he'll make his one exception—or so he thinks—to this
summer's silence, at Tony's, the beach's
lone Italian fine dining, where he'll stop busing tables, turn
to surprise us: his happy birthday to you to our mother, a cappella,
laying down every spaghetti-twisted fork, pulling even
the cooks from the kitchen. He's that good.

I've wondered if he fears the presence of an audience
dilutes, somehow, the instrument. But
walking in on him tonight, I understand: he's
Orpheus, dangerous power to move a stone, to make

and unmake, incite to further madness those
already unhinged, inspire the gods
to call Eurydice out of the dark. I wish
I could tell him it's not his fault his song
becomes mine when I hear it.
The roof is lifting off the scaffold of this house.
Knives in their drawers have gone percussive.
My brother's song is sky at dusk unfolding its stars, galoshes
troubling a puddle back to rain. It's the old
strange tremble in my chest when, to prove it wasn't
the quick- kind, I stepped out onto the sand to learn it was.

I dare not stir, not even to slip the keys
to the counter. I am next to enter
the coliseum: we who are about to die, next
to be fired from the cannon, next soul
for whom the gate with its pearls like teeth
has opened. The boat tacks now toward
our new country. Words drop from our tongues
like tickets, spent. One day scholars writing A History of Language
will sink their heads to their desks, stumped
by the lost word brother. Hold on. He

slows it down, wraps each note in a softness, opposite
of mussels in their shells. I remember myself, farther back.
Unlike the flimsy ballerina in the music box, turning
over and over over the years to her one song, I've been spun
by many, all part of the same: cheap kazoo prize
from the Guess Your Age booth, tobacco-clouded
codger every autumn bringing our piano
into tune, Mama humming at the end
of a set of lullabies she rocked me nightly to
while my brother slept inside her waiting to be born.

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Copyright © 2024 Rhett Iseman Trull All rights reserved
from Copper Nickel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission