when the farm was sold,
youngest brother went to work for the Brodies ;
voyages in a pale and shallow sky,
riders through memory and the sinking gates
the hired hands keep moving,
restless in the brown and settled country,
roads lined straight to the fields;
dying of sicknesses that hollow the blood,
mourn in odd sockets
the constellations drew back at dawn,
taking the white light of his eyelids
still, a siren of wind in the shaking aspens
still, the swaying and hushing of porch doors ;
leaving behind no wives or children,
no runners to echo or breathe his soft steps,
will he fall into a country
even more treeless?
any large buffalo may be flicking his tail
in grassy regions,
in plateaus dragged by mute carcasses;
yet these same beasts
are trembling into extinction
and who will summon the youngest brother;
who call the strangers that follow our sleep?
Robert Wrigley
from
AUBADE FOR MOTHERS
The Ritual of Expulsion and Yearning
I am alone in the nursery corridor,
moving window to window,
