A brother I began with. He sometimes told me things and was funny., older, there. I remember that. Life enters and so does death. The story just is terms, and can be forgotten. We stopped seeing anything and eventually he died in the time of living until not.
People live the roundness of this, everyday. We find streets to walk along and call it America. It could as easily be pang. Local reference brings pang and souring on the edge. America is just a town and towns are plenty. Language makes difference seem real. America prides in shores for rivers, lakes, and seas. Some on the byways look around, some weigh the mercantile gist.
The brother married and the brother learned the news in the envelope his wife opened. Just those times of dark invitation and choice: join the Army or join the Army. He chose to join the Army. Prison or flee were prospects too in country pathos. The collective mold a scatter as a preen, and time went every which way.
Set up thus he must say goodbye. Family gathered just for this, for going away. I held it together with a strain. At the going away door, the end of something unprepared for, he extended his hand to shake. I didn’t shake it, I held it as a strange and growing thing. As soon as the door closed I was in my room, crying in my room. This adding up did not add up at age 16 or whatever colour.
No sooner had I thrown myself on my bed than my mother joined for a hug and cry. Not the natural nature of this family, such rise from such light, the cool bunting of English tradition, let us say. And in this bewildered intimacy—for my mother as well as me—I thought this was a moment, a written moment. I did not then, or other thens, write as I felt then to write. But it was then and intent, as the country troubled to trouble. Years go by with what we say we say.
Later he went to Vietnam and later still returned. The family tendered it’s expression in terms of brothers marrying, families growing, parents aging, and then. I was the closed, slow, abiding one. A minor exception as I come to understand, the shading of the story.
Of course coastal locales were settled first. Rivers and waterways brought people in, the people with their anchors attaching forcefully to the land. Concord was an early inland settlement. People clash in the land of life.
Musketaquid as the early population called it, grass-grown, a sluggish waterway and deliverance, now named Concord River. It gave of its wildlife, succored the people there. Tanneries, iron works, drainage from farms, not even mentioning the chemical run off from perfect latter day lawns, and you shouldn’t want to eat the fish you catch.
And this river joins the Merrimack and wider vistas, even the ocean of everywhere. Henry and John rowed down to the sea in a book, as part of the life, the life now called Lowell and other varied names.
And people all along the way of rivers, lakes, and mighty seas. And not just people but all effects of life. Those alive live and those that live not leave us with a time. Time culls and collects to the mouth of the sea.
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