Monologue of a Ghost

I came because I hadn’t been a brother—
mocking you, mocking your seriousness,
always with your dreaming, head in a book,
and I was king of the world till you were born.

An old story, brothers. Resentment. Neglect.
And here you were asleep. That little house
across the continent from our mountain home.
I pulled out a pocket of time and came to you,
but all these other years came out as well,
as if my whole existence came unstuffed
and I was floating there like fluff, like love,
like anger poisoning our family.

Guess who, little brother. Who’s in the room?

                                 *

We were war babies, aftermath of war,
our father’s war and the war in Vietnam
that made me want to get inside the world
to find out how it worked. To see it real
and get away from that other war, the one
our mother fought. The nullifying bottle.

I’m in Rhodesia, 1973,
and there’s music playing. I’ve had some bourbon,
so I’m floating in the house, far from home.
I’ve been abroad a year, and now my job
means travel to the villages, teaching the vote,
trying to stay clear of guerilla war.
The kind of job a young man does, thinking
he’s protected by a magic war shirt.
But I’m floating on that music in the room,
Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, and it’s like I’m falling,
slow-mo, with this big stoned grin on my face,
happy because I’m in my life, alone.
I rent the house with two Canadians
but this night I’m alone and in my life.
I know I’ll go as far as Vietnam,
my generation’s war. I want to see it.

Salisbury. April 1973.
And though my work seems futile I pursue it
with all the rigor of a young idealist.
Alone, I go out to the Queen’s Hotel,
which has a bar that lets in colored folks,
not blacks, but mixed-race, mixing with the whites.
I dance there with a pretty girl. She tries
to talk me out of cab fare and I leave
alone and walk back toward the rented house.

I’ve gone two blocks when I meet a group of girls.
Their friend is injured, Rose, a nasty cut
where a drunk boyfriend struck her across the forehead.
And I’m a doctor’s son
so I go into doctor mode and stand there,
examining her wound beneath the streetlight.
It will take stitches. Her blouse is wet with blood.
We find a cab, head for Harare Township
because the hospital there will take in blacks.
I’m in the cab with them, pressed close to Rose,
the warm air whooshing past us at the window,
the streets crowded, people on the move.
Rose and I keep looking at each other.
She has a way of laughing despite her wound,
the freckles under her dark laughing eyes,
and I am happy being in my life.

The driver leaves us with a Shona blessing.
While Rose is filling in the paperwork
I watch the other people in the queue,
two stumbling guys with knife wounds, dripping blood,
women and sick children, fluorescent light
gathering white moths above their heads.
The fee is twenty cents. Rose has no money
so they waive the fee. A doctor comes and goes.

Her friends depart, leaving me to wait with Rose.
My life would be the stuff of such encounters,
working with people to improve their lives.
It’s late. Rose has decided not to wait,
so we go out, looking for antiseptic.
Now it’s Sunday morning, shuttered shops.
Rose takes me to her room. It’s very small,
a hot plate and a toilet shared with neighbors.
We cannot dress her wound, and we are tired,
so we lie down together on her bed.
And sleep. And it would fill me with regret
that we do not have sex, but when I leave
I wonder if it’s fear or only that
I’m trying to get back inside my life.

                                 *

The fighting in the countryside was tense,
the government cracking down. Time to go.
Remember Rose, little brother. Ah, Rose!
I saw her again, unexpectedly,
but not in Africa.

I took the hippie trail in India,
went overland through Burma, always east,
knowing I’d get close to Vietnam.
I’m on the Mekong River with a German
and another Yank who knows an opium den
right out of Hollywood. Three dim lamps.
Next to each lamp two mats, two pillows.
Smokers lie on their sides. A woman lies
beside them, calmly making them a pipe.
120 kip for a small pellet,
cut in smaller pieces for the bowl. I lie
down on the mat, my head on the hard pillow.
The pipe is handed to me by this girl.
It isn’t like an acid trip, or weed,
it’s not like booze that robs you of coherence.
You see the world with great lucidity.
I am an old man looking back, my life
a thing that has a shape, and I will have
someone important to me to tell it to.
Remember, little brother, being young,
thinking a magic war shirt kept us safe?
Remember thinking we would see old age?

February 1974.
I’m in Phnom Penh when it gets hit by rockets.
The shit’s starting. My hotel room’s shaken,
I see the crater an explosion left
and smell the aftermath, the pungent smoke.
Adrenaline is pumping through my limbs,
a kind of music, more fugue state than fugue.
I know that I will never see Saigon,
and when Cambodia finally goes to hell
whole families I know escape to Thailand,
then nowhere I can locate.

                                 *

I found you, brother, in America.
I looked for work, planting my feet on earth
and trying not to be such an idealist.

We climbed together, that two-pitch granite
in Colorado where you went to college.
We couldn’t talk, but we could risk our lives
and call it bonding in the way of men,
numbed by the many cold wars of our childhood.

I found work in political campaigns
to run our rainy city by the sea,
seeing firsthand how the deals are made.
I think of my generation, all becoming ghosts,
the music of our time, Jimi Hendrix
a Seattle boy dead at the age I died,
and Janis and so many others, that crowd
at Woodstock thinking they were bringing change,
how I went out into the world to change it
and came back to responsibility,
moving the ball a yard, losing the yard.
Nothing we did made sense except our music,
but I could not make music. I could work.

Women I dated didn’t want that life
until I met a volunteer, alert
and small, athletic, bursting with braininess.
Her name was Cat and you came to our wedding
where you hit it off by talking books with her.
You said to me she’s like a cat the way
she’s so contained, the way she warms to you.
Strange, how hard it was to talk of children.
We married to enhance our new careers.

I was a realist now about the world,
expecting nothing more than the next election.
You’d written to me of your own hard travels,
those days in Belfast looking for a war
the April Saigon fell,
but now we had to prove ourselves in work,
the slog they call responsibility.
We always said we’d get together again
and climb some peak and really have a talk.
We spoke of Shuksan in the North Cascades,
the way those glaciers hung above our childhood
like ice in us we’d left unspoken of.
Two brothers, roped up, aiming for the peak,
would come to know each other like old friends—
one tug of the rope, you at the other end.

                                 *

In the end I did the climb with Steve, a friend
from the campaign office, an immigrant
from Vietnam whose childhood name meant mountain
so he hungered for the feel of ice and rock.

I had been feeling strange, outside my life,
nearing thirty, my work and marriage strained,
my brain crammed with the latest crime statistics,
minutes of budgetary meetings, speeches,
so to lead my young friend on a mountain trail
was lightening, through the alpine meadows
to Lake Ann, where we had an icy swim
and studied shelf on shelf of glaciers leading
brilliantly upward to a diamond summit.

The strangest thing. While wading in the tarn
I cut my foot on a shard of beer glass—
fucking beer glass under a pristine glacier.
I lay back in our tent, Steve dressed the wound,
and maybe for an hour I felt relieved
we had a reason not to try the climb.

A thunderstorm that night confirmed it for us.
We huddled in the tent, unable to talk
while sheets of rain whipped over us, thunder
barreling across the sky, rock chimneys
turned to waterfalls above us in the clouds.

I dreamed of rockets and a smoking crater
but it was in Seattle, not Phnom Penh.
My fault somehow. I’d failed to take precautions.

And then I woke. The nylon tent let in
first light. I heard the rush of mountain air
and knew that we would climb.

I stood in laced boots. My foot felt strong.
I had that feeling of being young again,
immortal, wearing a magic war shirt.
You decide to do a thing that maybe scares you
and you do it and you’re not scared anymore.
We took day packs, left heavy stuff in our tent.
We had the rope, ice axes and crampons,
some sandwiches and water. That was it.

You know as well as I do how it feels,
the body moving upward where air thins
and the heart lightens and you feel your limbs
becoming confident.
Above the first glacier were the rock chimneys,
not so narrow you could wedge your body in,
more a scramble on all fours, vertical.
We roped up for the next pitch, snow and ice
in sunburst dishes higher than the birds.

The air on a mountain summit is a stroke
of sunlit brilliance when you’ve climbed to get there,
even a small peak like Shuksan has the loft,
like lieder, or like a symphonic poem.
I know I teased you about your poetry,
told you how ridiculous it was,
but chastised myself for everything I said.
You were attempting to do a hard thing,
a thing most people fail at
and I should never have made fun of you.
You weren’t very good at it,
not yet, but you had the thing you must have
that makes you stick it out against the doubters.

I wish I could have told you what I felt
and maybe that’s why I’m here in the room,
looking at you sleeping with your bride
who doesn’t get you either. Everyone
finds you a mystery. I should have said
there’s nothing wrong with mystery, nothing
wrong with finding your own way in the dark.
So here you’re working as a gardener,
living in this small caretaker’s cottage
with your bride, and you too are avoiding children.

I fell because I made a simple mistake,
got into the wrong chimney heading down.
It flared out. I climbed out on the face to scout
a route and we were not roped up, or Steve
would have gone with me. It might have been my foot,
or I no longer had a grip on life.
I hit a shelf on my back. Nothing to hold
and I was in the air and knew what happened.
I saw where Cat still waited for me, her panic
when the sheriff’s car drew near. I saw
our father with his anger about the war,
our mother struggling just to be alive,
and I saw Rose, that room in Africa.
She was very beautiful, smiling at me,
and her wound had healed. I reached out at her.
Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

I’m in the room. You think you’re dreaming but
it’s me, I swear to you.
I find the pullstring to turn on the light,
lean over you so you can feel my breath.
I swear I haven’t come to do you harm.
I swear I’ve come to show you what I know,
what life is for, and why it is we suffer.
We’re here to learn what love is. And to love,
make something beautiful and die like music.
I’m holding you now, just as you emerge
from far away, shouting my name. I hear
your racing heart, the silence of the room,
your young wife telling you you’ve had a dream,
only a dream, go back to sleep. You know
I’m not a dream. I am as real as night,
as real as all the walls that hold us in
and everything in us that seeks escape.

I’ve sent a message to you. You will learn.
I’m sorry, brother, it will be so hard.