ISSUE: Winter 2003
Laudato si’, mi Signore, per sora nostra Morte corporale
da la quale nullo omo vivente po’ scampare.
St. Francis
Death is my idiot
brother, who comes babbling something I don’t yet
understand and throws
his arms around me and kisses me full
on the mouth.
I hug him back. St. Francis got it all
wrong. Death
isn’t our sister, Laudato si’, mi Signore.
Tom Andrews
knew it too. Death was always his brother,
John, who kept
beckoning him from the beyond. “The dead drag
a grappling hook
for the living. The hook is enormous,” Tom said
in his shortest
poem. Tom was the hooked rainbow trout fighting
hard, prismatic
flash of silver muscle breaking the surface, taking the line out
from the screeching
reel with the drag on, and finally hauled thrashing into the air, gasping
for water.
Death was his true element. He swam well. Life caught him,
then threw
him back. Laudato si’, mi Signore. He almost jumped
from a seven-story
parking garage, while his poetry students waited for him
to come
to the last class of the year. The tulips bloomed late,
as always
in Indiana, recalcitrant miserly spring that spent
only a handful
of red petals, when it should have been prodigal
April. Tom walked
back down. Laudato si’, mi Signore. Did he teach
that last class?
I never learned. A year later he visited us in Georgia and told us how
one week earlier
he had piped his exhaust into the cab of the blue truck with a rubber hose
but stopped
when his kittens Geoffrey and Emma crawled
onto the windshield
and tried to climb in with him, mewing for milk, scrambling up the glass
and sliding
back down. When he finally went to bed, Dana and I worried
he would kill
himself overnight. But then, at the same moment, we burst
out laughing—
Tom was too “polite” to commit suicide
at his friends’ house.
Laudato si’, mi Signore. The forsythia flamed
like a guardian
angel with a drawn sword outside his window
while he slept
sound. Chronic depression couldn’t kill him. His hemophilia
didn’t stop
him riding motorcycles down the long flat roads of Indiana
through cornfields
that stretched dark green to the horizon, so much sky,
a few golden tassels
of cirrus clouds, the sun setting within reach
on one side,
the full moon rising on the other, those two shining brass
pans of the invisible
balance that seesaws and weighs out our nights and days. Into the humid dusk
Tom cruised
at seventy miles per hour. His girlfriends held on tight. Laudato si’,
mi Signore.
They were all at his funeral, four ex-girl friends, two ex-fiancées,
and Carrie
his ex-wife. They sobbed and embraced each other in chorus.
His old teacher and I
read five of his poems aloud and then shut the words
back in their books.
The pianist played Satie’s Gymnopédie while sirens
careened
past the church. Tom, you would have loved the clanging fire engine
that interrupted
the program so that the pianist had to stop
and wait
for all that commotion to pass. We sang “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones.” It took
a long name, thrombotic
thrombocytopenic purpura—freak virus, “a rare, but sometimes deadly, blood disorder”—
to kill you,
and five weeks in a coma while Alice your mother and Alice your fiancée tried
to keep you
alive. Your brother, who died from renal failure twenty-one years
ago, kept whispering
through your respirator’s deep kiss, telling you not
to be afraid—
“It must be a country without pain. It must be a quiet
place where the stillness
under your wrist is entered like a field of thyme
and peppergrass. . . .”
Laudato si’, mi Signore. Today, at my parents’ summer cottage,
my own brother yanks
me by the hand and points to the forty-foot silver birches
uprooted
and blown down by an August storm’s micro-bursts. “Where baz, baz?” he lisps.
”Buds?” I ask.
He jerks his head from side to side. I try again.
”Birds?”
He smiles and nods. He means the crows, whose black song wakes
him every morning,
have had to leave the birches and have flown to roost in the jack pines. Awe, awe, they cry.
Grief is the only
note they know. Laudato si’, mi Signore. How I’ll remember
Tom Andrews always
is in my friend’s story at the bar after the funeral—
him flying down
the hill past her house, doing a handstand on her son Will’s
skateboard, while
she stood petrified on her front porch with beautiful Carrie, who shouted
out only,
“Hey you, crazed bleeder jock on that skateboard,
wanna get married?”
In the bar, eleven years later, Carrie blushed. It was her, Sister Life,
Tom courted
upside down, feet pointing to the sky, his body a swaying
exclamation
point, the skateboard beneath him rumbling hallelujah
over the pitted
asphalt, while Carrie clapped, whistled, and called after him, “Come back,
you dummkopf. Come back!”
