Moment

This moment.

Walking down the mountain

this rock is here

               not there.

It is shaped just so

               not any other way.

This plant is there

               not here.

It is shaped just so

                     not any other way.

A living plant, thriving

               while this other plant is dying

                    and that one over there

                              is clearly dead.

This lizard

               is on a rock over here

                              in the sun

not anywhere else

until my moving shadow sends him scurrying

       for a still shadow.

This moment.

Rock

     plant

           lizard.

There is fog over the ocean

               all the way to the horizon,

almost no wind

               in a season when it’s usually windy.

And though it seems that wild onions, indian paintbrushes,

buttercups, bush lupine, monkey flowers and morning glories are blooming

               everywhere,

   they are not.

Everywhere is a collection of precise somewhere’s.

Each plant is in its place and nowhere else

and there is considerable space between all of them

filled with many others less obvious to the eye right now

—wild cucumber vines,

Yerba Buena, coyote brush, ferns,

incipient goldenrod and stinging nettle

shiny bushes of the three-leaved oak

               men curse and deer devour

                                          --the blooming

                                   and not-yet-blooming—

not to mention the grasses—veldt, fountain, giant reed,

               wild oats, smooth brome

—the seeding

   and not-yet seeding--     

       each an exact life in an exact place                                                               

   in its own moment

               in my moment

                              in this moment…

the one that is not mine

the one that cannot be owned,

                                              only entered.

My body has lived sixty-seven years

               beyond my mother’s,

not forty-seven, not eighty-seven

but this body right now

               thankfully strong enough                                                                    

that I am here on this mountain,

though my skin has given up some radiance

as a homage to time,

       

This moment.

My eyes with bifocals

               not the falcon’s vision of my youth

but not the blindness I may one day

be privileged

               to know as a very old man

whose moments will be more laden with memories

               than the making of them.

Body strong.

Breath strong.

Spirit strong.

This moment.

Bereft of mother

father

      brothers

               alone here on this mountain

           the deep sorrow of walking so far beyond them

               fully mine

the deep joy of finding a companion

               to walk with me

to the end,

of seeing my son become a man beyond

               the one I raised him to be,

of having good work helping others in ways

               I never imagined

--all gathered together,

fully mine.

This moment.

            My moment

               --loved and loving

still striving

still striding toward that very specific

final step

beyond anger and judgment

                   where the embrace

of all that has come and might come

                              is complete.

Rock

plant

lizard

body

breath

sorrow

joy

memory

yearning.

I am here

                                   nowhere else

                              shaped just so

                                   not any other way,

                         fully in my moment

                which opens its chrysalis

                              into

               the moment that cannot be owned,

               the one that can only be entered,

               the one that I enter

                              now.

C 2014 Bob Kamm

The Gaze

for my granddaughter Kiera

She is nearly one year old

and has probably learned more

               in this year,

making all the new and strange

               familiar,

than I have in the last twenty.

However

clearly she has not heard

that stars reside light years away

because

her eyes are twin blue stars

right here

              before us.

Clearly she has not heard

that blue stars in particular

are so hot

they are gone

in the blink

of a cosmological eye.

Her twin blue stars warm

                with no danger of burning us

or burning out.

Yet there is another kind of light

that arises from her

but does not originate in her.

It is gathered by her presence,

called home by her cheeks.

I have seen this light

                on the cheeks

      of white orchids

in the rainforest of Peru

--a light that filters down through

layered leaves and

     nestles silently on petals,

a soothing glow

          that quiets you

and draws you closer.

Twin suns gazing.

Cheeks gathering.

A small smile summoning.

All saying silently together,    

“I am here.

 I see you.

          I see you

                            seeing me.        

I am awake.

                I am alive!”

C 2014 Bob Kamm

Hold the Sky

for my granddaughter, Ember

My granddaughter

               Ember

just short of

her second birthday

reaches up, out, down

because holding

is new and

             how she understands things best.

She literally grasps

                   in order to grasp

but not just with hands

           as she did some months ago

--a tiny plastic dinosaur, a piece of apple, a stick

her grandpa’s glasses—

now with her arms, her whole body.

“Hold!” she sings reaching her arms out,

                                             her tiny torso arching to the effort.

(All her words are small songs, even

single syllables have at least two notes).

She sees a tree outside

and sings, “Tree.  Hold!”

She points to the clouds

and sings, “Clouds.  Hold!”

and the sky, “Sky.  Hold! Hold!”

this one with more intensity

reaching her arms almost straight up.

 “Can you hold the sky, Ember?” I ask

“Yeah,” she answers with two notes.

“And can the sky hold you?”

“Yeah,” two notes and a nod

                       of utter certainty.

She throws her head back,

    stretches her whole body,

               rises on her toes

as if to will herself

higher and higher

    until she can

         hold the sky

and by holding

                  know it.

Later in the day

    walking alone

I look up and think,                             

“I’m almost seventy

              and maybe I’ve forgotten

                             how to understand the sky.

I’m not talking about collisions of molecules

      or the scattering of light waves.

I’m talking about

                      knowing the sky

as only a mystery can be known

    by getting your arms around it

                       pressing yourself against it

                            letting your heart beat into it

and its heart beat

            into you.

Maybe I need to reach higher.

Maybe I need to reach harder.

Maybe I need to stretch my body more.

Maybe I need to throw my toes all the way into it

                    as I once did

                              long ago

                          when I first held the sky

and the sky

         held

                me.”

C 2014 Bob Kamm

Apologies to the Goddess

Kwan Yen--our little goddess of compassion.  We found her in a local nursery.  She is slim

and stands only four feet tall but weighs close to two hundred pounds from molded concrete.

A concrete goddess…how’s that for an oxymoron?  She is coiffed and clothed as a Chinese girl should be and would even warrant the adjective demure but for her small right foot—all five perfect little toes--boldly presenting themselves from beneath her floor-length skirt. Is it because she is going somewhere?

Did the artist capture her in the midst of a small but sure step or is this a subtle offering, a promise of a different kind of divine delight?  I guess we will never know.  Her lips are sealed.

When we stood her against the small arched wooden bridge in our front yard we thought it the perfect place for her energy to emanate and envelop our entire acre.  And for a number of months it was so. This goddess of compassion made compassion reign.  Flowers bloomed, fruit appeared, birds and butterflies filled the air.

But then, the plague arrived, the plague of oak moth caterpillars gnawing their way through our luxuriant oak canopy, rappelling down from the heights like an endless gang of warriors.  They covered   our walls and walkways with their skinny black and green bodies and copper helmets and their poop—which scientists have given the dubious name frass.  Frass descended from the leaves above blanketing everything, its smell spoiling every inhale.  A biologist friend told us this is a once every six or seven year phenomenon.  If you don't do commercial spraying (expensive!) right at the first sign, it's a waste.  The oak trees, though utterly stripped, will rebound. The caterpillars will become pupae and the pupae moths but once hatched they will move on and even if they don’t their children, the next generation of caterpillars, will die at the hands of a tiny parasite that takes but a single generation to catch up to its prey. Isn’t nature wonderful?  The balance!  Ah!!  It only takes one year for the parasites to overtake the marauding worms and set things right. So our friend, counseled, since we woke up to the invasion too late for commercial spraying, we should “become one with the caterpillars.” In other words, let Kwan Yen’s spell of mercy abide.

Alas, we could not. The smell of the frass was too “in your nose”, the sight of the caterpillars too icky.  Yes, so icky that a couple in their sixties had to reach back to the childhood word icky to describe them. And the final straw floated down when they covered Kwan Yen’s tiny toes, nose, eyes and ears.

Now you might say they were showing her affection.  One of the stories about her tells us that animals had an affinity for her, even helped her do burdensome chores in a monastery hundreds of years before St Francis spoke to birds in Europe.

You might say they were showing her respect.

You might say the caterpillars were worshipping at her feet, on her feet, limbs, hands, face and hair.

And you might say they were a dastardly pestilence

that needed to be mercilessly wiped

from the earth.

Believe me, we tried to be good students of our goddess, to be one with one with the worm, one with the frass, one with the pupae.  Unfortunately, like all humans except those who attain godly status we were weakened by our anger.  We attacked those worms and their little sleeping pods with environmentally friendly death sprays, wire brushes, power washers, blowers and outdoor vacuums strong enough to uproot an oak.  We sucked, squashed, smashed, blew and blasted them off our walls and deck.  As each day passed we embraced our murderous mission with greater zeal, driven to the precipice of madness by the pungency of frass.  

But finally, it was over.  

Every last worm was either dead or had spun its tiny sanctuary of transformation in the branches beyond our reach.  Then and only then did we approach our freshly washed goddess to ask for compassion when we had given none, mercy when we had been merciless.  For the legend tells us she refused to go into heaven because she heard the cries of the world and wanted to return to assuage them.  Weren’t those cries now coming from us?   Yes, but our cries, were not at first for forgiveness, because we did not seek it.  We did not feel guilty, initially.  After all, if we had not done the killing, wouldn’t the parasites?  How would that have been preferable?

We felt ambivalent and confused. We were both sorry and not sorry.  That's what we cried to have lifted from us--ambivalence and confusion.  We cried over our low tolerance for frass falling from the sky, sharp smells, gangs of insects that, unlike the migrations of monarch butterflies, had for us no redeeming qualities whatsoever; a low tolerance in general for beings—human and otherwise—that were different, and neither beautiful nor useful in their differentness.  We cried out not only for mercy and understanding.  We cried out for the the spell of being human to be re-cast so that compassion would live in our hearts, not just flop on the couch for a week from time to time.  We cried out for the strength to  trust more, allow more, witness more.  We cried out for our capacity for anger to be reshaped into a greater capacity for love that we might be one with nature and one with mankind and our wars against both might finally come to an end. 

Only weeks after the moths left, the canopy was full and lush again, in fact, more luxuriant than it had been before the caterpillars arrived.  The irony weighed heavily upon us.  Heavily.  We stood in the shade surveying our little piece of reborn heaven, trying not to notice that the ground was littered with tiny graves.

C 2014 Bob Kamm

A Poem of Thanksgiving

Inspired by elder Gerry Oleman

of the Coast Salish People of British Columbia

during his welcoming remarks at the 9^th Annual Imago Conference in Vancouver, BC, 2012

Long before us

 skies

    sun and moon

     oceans

         deserts

forests

                              meadows

                                 mountains.                                                          

Long before us

eagle

       and all that lived beneath her.

Long before us

               rain tapping on the beetle’s back.

Long before us

reflections in pools of quiet creeks

flowing and frozen,

   reflections of overhanging trees,

the movement of light on berries,

the faces of buck, doe and fawn,

               raccoon, wolf, cougar,

                      ovenbird rocking on twig,

the tightening of night’s grasp

       on trunks and rocks.

But no images

               of  human face

                       not one

not in puddle or pond

          not in the hand mirrors of ice-clad leaves,

               not even in the eye of predator or prey.

Long before us

      beings of all kinds

            writing their exquisite

and desperate

      life stories

on pages of earth, air, water, bark and stone,

leaving behind few traces

-- faint echoes broken by wind.

Not for us the great awakening of life

but each life for itself

and the shimmering whole

and the joy and sadness

of The Mother and Father of All Things.

The Mother and Father of All Things

who through their

restless risky dance

     made the universe

                          from a solitary seed

-the seed of all seeds

all beings

all things.

We are here now.

And though we strut about

proud parrots,

we are small,

         late-comers to the festival.

We still don’t know the dances.

If we are honest

we must wonder

if The Mother and Father of All Things

for a single moment

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity

imagined

we would become so discontent

with the abundant gardens They provided,

would set out

to live

not just outside them

                              but

       everywhere

with such fiery intention

our success was assured.

Did Mother and Father,

having birthed all things

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity         

from the seed of all seeds,

pause

     even for a moment

to imagine

that one day

their favored principle

of hunter and hunted

would run amok in us,

that we would

discard and devour

               so much of the earth

and hound so many species

as well as our own mothers, fathers

               brothers, sisters

               sons and daughters

into a Great Vanishing?

With such history behind and within us,

how is it that Mother and Father

still let us live

let us struggle to find our way

               toward redemption?

Are They simply indulgent weavers who cannot discard

a deeply flawed blanket

whose dark designs they have come to love?

Or are They truly possessed

of  a compassion beyond our comprehension?

At this moment

life is ours.

Let us set our feet on the path

with prayers

of thanksgiving.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to Mother and Father.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to all They put here before us

that led to now,

“Thank you!” to all that is,

“Thank you!” to all that will be.

For fourteen billion years

we

    were

not

                                     yet.

Mother and Father birthed the universe

without a hand from us,

worked out its drama

through cold and hot fury,

barrenness, solitude, roar and silence,

then

gave us

     the chance to wriggle

from long-ripening wombs.

Why us? 

Why was each of us born and not others?

Why did we make adulthood and not others?

How can we show our gratitude and worthiness

for such a chancy investment?

Let us offer still more thanks.

Let us give thanks

to The Mother and Father of All Things

 for having

the wild, foolish, restless impulse to choose

us

and not brother sperm

               or sister ova.

Let us thank the earth They made

which has given rise to all we draw upon

               for sustenance and succor

--to the waters we use

to grow and cook,

slake our thirst,

 clean our bodies,

          frolic and fish;

 to the soil that gives rise to plants

that give us sweet air to breathe,

 plants we eat,

 plants we use to weave, build, warm,

trap, hunt, play  and heal;

Let us give thanks

to all the beings

         from the tiniest we cannot see

to the largest

whose flesh, bones, sinews and skins

we have taken

with ecstasy and sadness

for we know they were not made for us

but for themselves,

for the shimmering whole

 and for Mother and Father

in their incomprehensible creative fervor.

Let us give thanks to the long bead chain of grandmothers

who

carried and birthed other grandmothers until

our own mothers ripened and carried us

and helped us wriggle into the wild,

beautiful,

sad and terrifying

world.

To all who were present at the moment of our births

we give thanks,

the family and tribe that cared for us

in our helplessness

when we were pure

and yet

 knew nothing

and all those who caressed and patted us

               along our way to discover

               how to become human beings

how to live and love

with elegance and awkwardness

                              brilliance and ignorance

               how to sing, dance, drum, whoop, laugh,

          whisper and weep

                              together,

how to hold each other with bold affection

               and yet step back so each of us can

                              hear

                              the song of his own being.

May we raise our children

               with such right love

                   --devotion without indulgence--

               that before long

               across the many lands

               each soul is a gathering place

                              where all souls are safe.

Then may our ways

                           be fragrant as spring soil

and tasty as ripe berry juice

                                                            to Mother and Father

so They might find us worthy

     of their work and worry,

give us

lives

   that are

good

               and long

and end

     with our cheeks

 on Their chests

as we listen to Their hearts

drum

  drum

      drum

before setting out

               for the gardens

in the bright reaches

of their eyes.

C Copyright 2012 Bob Kamm, reproduction by author’s permission only.

My Brother Lew Has Cancer, Part II

My brother, Lew, had cancer.  He died on the evening of July 8^th.  He was sixty-eight.

It still feels unreal.   He was only diagnosed in April of 2011.  I know, many others go much faster.  Our oldest brother, Larry, was gone suddenly in a matter of weeks back in 2004, at sixty-four.  If this were a hundred years ago, both of them would have been considered old.  But it isn’t and they weren’t.

Untimely death.  Maybe we call it that because when someone is taken too soon, it scrambles our sense of time. 

Today is 1955.  The latest national event is Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett on TV.  Our father, a New York City journalist, manages to arrange for us to meet him.  I am eight.  Lew is ten.  We walk into a hotel room in New York and there he is, all six foot five of him, in buckskin and a coonskin cap.  We sit on his knees.  He shows us the enormous bowie knife.  He tells us that the Georgie Russell character played by Buddy Epsen wasn’t a real person, but represents a number of sidekicks that Crockett had.  We feel as if we’ve been initiated into special information from a larger-than-life figure.  He gives us each a coonskin cap.  We have our pictures taken, sitting there on his knees, in our caps.  We are going to wear them for the next several months, go to sleep with them on our pillows.  We are going to be celebrities in our neighborhood because we got them directly from “Davy Crockett himself.”  We will spend the summer running around the little town of Highlands, New Jersey, where our grandfather lives, with coon tails flying—flags of boyhood.

This is today.  It walks with me.  If I take a quick step in the right direction, I can be running up Bay Avenue in Highlands, a mile from the ocean with Lew beside me.

                                                   ****

It’s also today that he is asking me again about our mother’s final days.  He wants to know the mechanics of going to sleep until the end comes.  She had morphine pills placed under her tongue.  She slept for five days and died.  He is going to ask Nancy, his oncologist about methodology.  He continues to have breakthrough pain at night and he and Nancy continue to adjust the medication to combat it.  Cancer not only consumes the body.  It consumes the mind.  Beyond a certain point there is nothing else to think, feel, talk or learn about but this treatment, that theory, this drug combination, the quality or personality of this doctor, nurse, lab tech, survival rates, the fate of others with similar afflictions and, above all, pain and managing pain.  The joys and interests of a lifetime are utterly upstaged. Lew has thought hard about the courage it took our mother to say, “I’m there.  No more.  This is it.  I want to sleep now until the end.”  He tells me, “This isn’t it, yet, but it’s getting close.  I want to be prepared.” There are discussions of “the sublingual approach” being “a general part of the hospice comfort pack” and “fentanyl lollipops for immediate control of pain.”  Fentanyl lollipops.  Could the inventor of lollipops ever imagine that phrase?  All at once, things are moving faster than any of us have foreseen.  I’m booked for a return visit.  I’ve been convinced he’ll still be alive and awake when I get there.  Now I’m not so sure.

Then, suddenly, this email from him:  “This IS it Bob.  The combination of pain, fluids, and this and that over the past 2+ days has reached the point where Anne and I have this very evening to stop the dance…this has happened very quickly.  Where does this leave you?  Staying home?  Trying to have one last visit when I don’t know what the situation will be?  It leaves you and me forever in one another’s arms in ways that I’m sure neither of us would ever have imagined.  I want you to have as much time as possible to think about what you might want to do (to come or not to).  No matter what happens, what events unfold, know this:  I love you tremendously and thank you once again for your blog and so much more.  I will give Mom, Dad and Larry a big hug from you and confirm that we hope it will be many, many years indeed before we are all together again.”

I call as soon as I read this.  He is sleeping.  I ask Anne to try to read a final email to him if he awakens: “Lew, I love you. I love you.  I love you.  That is all I can give you to take with you.  I am so grateful for the love we have shared over a lifetime and over these last few years but especially these last few months.  You did not run.  You did not hide from what was coming.  You opened your eyes and your heart to all around you so they could receive the last and fullest measure of your soul’s gifts.  Thank you, my precious brother, thank you! I am walking with you to the threshold and waving you across.  Bob”.  

I am planning on going anyway, even if he is in his final sleep.  I can support my sister-in-law and Lew’s grandson, Ben.  And maybe Lew will sense my presence.  But this is not to be.  The day before my scheduled departure, Anne asks that I not come.  “The last 2 days on Lew’s downward spiral have been a free fall…  So, Bob, since spirit energy knows no time and space, you are as much with Lew now and he with you, as you could be here.  Save yourself and take a walk to Montana de Oro (the state park with miles of rustic beaches that are special to us) and visit with Lew there. Coming at this time would be futile...”  She wants to devote all her energy to his final moments.  It makes sense to me.  I stay home.  The next evening, before I would have arrived, he is gone.

                                                 ****

This is today, too, perhaps a year after coonskin caps.  My mother gets a phone call and goes gray in the face.  Lew has had a bad spill from his bike going down one of our town’s steeper hills.  Apparently a dog ran out and startled him.  He is at Overlook Hospital.  We rush there.  My heart hammers.  How hurt is he?  I feel my mother’s fear.  I see my father grit his teeth.  This is the first time in my life that I have been faced with the possibility one of us could be badly hurt in a life-changing way, or even killed.  I am shaking inside.  I grip my mother’s hand as we enter the hospital room.  At the same instant, we all connect with Lew’s eyes.  He is sitting up, alert, bruised all over his face and arms but fine.  When he comes home the next day, he gets to sit out in the side yard on the chaise lounge.  His bruises are all dabbed with some kind of jelly.  He looks funny and knows it.  Mom and Dad buy him a huge quantity of comic books.  He burns through them.

This is today.  I think about that moment when we walked into Overlook Hospital.  I think how wholly unpredictable and unforeseeable most of life is.  I think about how little time has passed though the calendar says it is nearly sixty years.  I think about how the beaches of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, were playgrounds and holy places in our childhood.  There was one beach where our parents paid a quarter for us to get on.  Then we were given a small yarn—red, blue, yellow, green, brown, gray, purple—that indicated we had paid that day.  We tied it on our bathing suits so the lifeguards knew we had paid.  I think about how the beaches of California’s Central Coast have become my holy places in adulthood, and certain beaches in the Rhode Island and Massachusetts area his…and where his ashes will be scattered.  I think that calendars and clocks are tricks, illusions.  They have nothing to do with time as the heart knows it.  Time is liquid, not linear.  I need to get some yarn in different colors.

                                                 ****

Another today.  He is retiring from 36 years of teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.  I ask, “Do you think you’ll do some part-time teaching?”  He answers rapidly, “No.  I’m done.  I’ve enjoyed almost every minute of my career.  But I’m done.”  I ask, “So what do you want to do?”  Again, he answers without hesitation, “Spend time with Anne, read, lay on the beach.”  For the past few years he has been sending me reading recommendations which we refer to as “Lew’s Book Club.”  He has done enough reading in his academic field.  These are wonderful novels, all the best contemporary stuff. He and Anne buy a little place to spend their winters in St. Augustine, Florida.  Anne, reading, beach (no yarn necessary).  All set up. Perfect.  What could go wrong?

                                                 ****

And this is today.  Our father has just died.  We take his ashes to a special beach at Montana de Oro state park here in San Luis Obispo County, Larry, Lew and myself.  We each pour some in the sea.  When Lew pours, a little wind tosses the ashes in a swirl around him, almost a caress.  Later, at a memorial service, we all speak some words about our father, the journalist, the lover of words.  Lew’s testament: “He was a man in full.”  Yes, not a perfect man, not a perfect father, but a man in full.  This day I can say the same of my brother.  He was a man in full.  A rare phenomenon in an angry time of half-beings.  A man in full whose bravery was met by the brute pain that cancer visits on its victims…and yet, a man in full to the end.

                                                 ****

Another today.  Some kind of sibling rivalry.  He is five years younger than Larry and only two older than I.  I guess I am an unwitting usurper, by dint of my position.  So, yes there are occasional struggles, a rare fist fight when I am six or seven (he wins with a fist on the top of my head that sends me crying), and some residual resentment riding into adulthood.  But this is generally not Shakespearean.  It’s run-of-the-mill jealousy, a peevishness that surfaces from time to time.  When our father dies, and I begin writing poetry in earnest for the first time in many years, he is avidly supportive.  He asks, “When are you going to start doing the thing you were born to do full time?”  Meaning, writing.  Meaning, specifically, writing poetry.  Meaning, life is short.  Who cares if you make money at it?  Just write.  I am touched by his enthusiasm and it continues and even grows as the last sheath of sibling rivalry is shucked away by the death of our brother early in 2004 and our mother in September of the same year.  “Write, Bob.  Just write.”

                                                ****

And this is today, toward the end of my visit in April of 2013, I am thinking what a good person Lew is.  He has never done any serious hurt to another human being.  He is a good man who has shared his joy of teaching and the French language and its literature with hundreds of students.  He has loved his wife, has been more a father to his adopted sons than their own, more a father to his grandson than his own.  There is no rhyme or reason to why this person gets cancer, or that person dies of a sudden heart attack or another person lives to 95 after being a royal prick most of his life. 

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This is a thought today.  It may be true that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, but that is not the case with memory.  All these moments, thoughts and feelings exist simultaneously within me.  As I said, time is liquid, not linear. It has depth and breadth, current and cross-current. Conflicting truths flow together, forming something unforeseen in a new kind of present tense.  We are a family of five and yet now we are one.  “We thought we’d be boys forever…”  So I wrote in a poem after Larry’s death and it is still true.  We are boys forever.  The sandbox will always contain us, the pine limbs bear our weight.  Yet, we are also reduced to one now…one person to hold the elixir of memory for an entire family.  One person to carry the love and the loss.

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Another today.  I am in my late twenties.  I write Lew and ask him to share his sweetest memories of our childhood together.  The first thing he offers is the two of us on all fours as little boys, probably three and five, playing animals under the dining room table.  I am so grateful for this, for it has left my own ready-recall file, but the moment I read it, the memories come back in detail. 

More than sixty years later, in this today, I realize he has always been there, for I was the youngest.  They were all there, always—Mom, Dad, Larry and Lew, each pouring their own rich memories into the chalice, many of which I could never have reclaimed on my own.  I have never known life without at least one of them being at the end of a phone call or email.   But Lew is gone and I now know life alone, life void of contribution.

 As I try to understand why the bond is so strong, the grief so deep, I return to that space between the four legs of our dining room table, a table that protected us like a mother elephant, and those moments when we crawled around making animal sounds, so close to each other that his particular five-year old boy smell wrote its verse in me, and the feeling when our bodies would bump against each other, and the sound of his breathing and his voice as it manifested growls, purrs, howls, barks and trumpeting—verse after verse.  We knew each other only as little brothers can in the dawn light of life. 

It was a unique bond.  We were animals together, slept in the same room, knew that we came from the same people, looked up to the same faces, loved the same voices, rode the same hips and shoulders and were looked after by the same oldest brother.  We ran through the same storm door into the winter snows where snowmen, snow angels and sleds were the kings, queens and royal carriages of our little land, a land where together we discovered the neighborhood and friends, games and rituals, hiding places, magical trees, swinging vines and outcroppings of ancient faces.  We also ran through the same screen door into the bright summer air to dash through backyards and front, ride bikes, throw and kick balls, climb fences and trees, explore brooks and catch lightning bugs. And on trips to our grandpa’s, we tanned nut-brown like twins under the same sun on the same sand and in the same Atlantic waves.  There was only one person on earth right beside me from the beginning, each of us making our own marks on our lives’ first pages of poetry--my brother, Lew.

No words or deeds can fully honor my love for him.  But I am heading to the beach today…and I have yarn.

C 2013 Bob Kamm