☀ Today's Poem: "After My Brother's Death, I Reflect on the Iliad" Elisa Gonzalez

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September 19, 2023

After My Brother's Death, I Reflect on the Iliad

The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair.
The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don't have the virus,
it's a bitch.
The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE
STORAGE.
My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things
have been,
and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only
to the dead, someone tells me— to comfort, I assume, or inspire,
but I take it literally as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and
let's cook tonight,
those are for you, Stephen. You won't come to me in my dreams,
so I must communicate by other avenues.
A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly's Fifty Days at Iliam
— a red bloom, on the words "like a fire that consumes all
before it"—
and asks: Have you seen this? Ir's at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art.
If I have, I can't remember, though I did visit
with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped
silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room
as guards jostles in, and I— though charged with keeping you
from trouble— joined the game, and the whole time we never
laughed,
not til we were released into the grand air we couldn't touch
and could.
You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for keys,
buy kale and radishes,
in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man
who killed my son.
Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labeled SIGNS SIGNS.
I've studied the mugshot of the man who killed you; I can
imagine his hands.
Of course I would. Each finger, even.
To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows
what I am capable of.
If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt,
sheen behind caution tape.
Homer's similes, I've been told, are holes cut in the cloth
between the world of war
and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even
there, a man hills his neighbor.
"Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son
into my arms
and have satisfied my desire for grief" —this, my mind's
new refrain
in the pharmacy queue, in the train's rattling frame.
The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert
"where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad."
It's nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability
of reference:
The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire.
We see double.
You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames,
one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It's like how sometimes I forget
your'e gone.
But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes
carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries,
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're already
dead.
How do I ensure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam's
ever?
I tell me friend, I want the page itself to burn.

from the book GRAND TOUR / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

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Forward

I think of this poem as an 'anti-elegy' or 'broken elegy.' It resists consolation. And it does so, in part, by turning to art and to the art that is the world as interlocutors: as much as it is an individual expression of rage and grief, it is a conversation, alive with voices of the living and the dead.
Elisa Gonzalez on "After My Brother's Death, I Reflect on the Iliad"

"Taylor Byas on The Wiz, Pop Culture, and Black Women's Histories"
"For me, poetry and popular culture play similar roles. One important role that I think they both share is to provide a snapshot of the world and the society from which they come. So when I consider how they help one another, I believe they serve as points of connection and community. "
via LITHUB

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What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Dumanis on Language as Form
"What determines the facts in question is the language, as well as the constraints I place on myself as an author. This is an autobiography that is not capable of ever saying 'I' or 'me' or 'mine,' as no words it uses can begin with any letter other than A. As a result, the poem is composed almost exclusively of sentence fragments."

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