Pressed between pages, this realistic painting
of hands, fingers curled and caked with dirt,
holding or holding-on to other hands, antiqued
and chipped like statuary, one pair in particular
outstretched like a praying set, proffering
a book, a penny, a mirror, a horror: a memory
like a recurring dream of returning
hands, yours among them in that GIF
your brother sent, a huge file that took
whole minutes to download on the ancient
computer and sketchy connection at my parents’
house in the sticks where I’d become a blown
glass figure in the sunroom window, and them
unsure how or whether to touch me, when or if
I could be left alone. Meanwhile I waited
for what I knew and didn’t know was coming.
Looking and quickly looking away. Through
the phone your brother’s voice said he’d stand
beside me, have my back. A voice that sounded
like my own spoke back. He said not to worry
about the rest of the family, what they did
or said or would or wouldn’t say.
Vowed to hold my hand through the wake,
the service in the frigid little chapel at Hall
Davis & Son Funeral Service, at least until
he rose to preach, to speak, but who
selects who’s heard, whose voice still
speaks, and who am I, uninvited, not
noted among the pallbearers, the survived-by,
and what right this ghostface like a negative
beside the all-black congregation in Baton Rouge
while outside August suffocates, wavering
toward which car, not the family, surely, and why
Lord how much more, hand-wringing and weeping,
twenty miles to Port Hudson National Cemetery,
drooping flowers suffering the heat, stunned anew
by all twenty-one blasts of the graveside salute,
the American flag draped folded and handed-
over. Not to me, though I reached. To the silent
father you last saw when you were nine.
But grief is steeped and wrenched by greed.
Each time I closed my eyes your hands reached
to hold me still. I opened them and told your brother
yes, I would meet to introduce the you he hadn’t seen
or tried to see in twenty years. I could still see you
in the photo. He wanted me to say it looked
like you again. My eyes fell from the faded
bloated hand-painted face (no longer golden,
each freckle buried under pancake) to the stiff-
collared shirt that hid the scarred neck,
down to the cuff of the new brown suit,
your folded hands laid forever over your
privates. All you had and had not done,
and by your own hand, and all the parts
(including me) unmentioned, not
at the service and never again.
The lid raised and gaping, and against
golden lining, something both you
and not you on view despite your wish
to be (written, erased, all your words) turned
to ash, scattered by my hands. Your hands
provided a place to focus until I could
summon the will the will the will to—
