'That Late Death Took All My Heart for Speech'

I’m not by nature a brooder. My brother died sixteen months ago yesterday, enough time for his death to have taken its place in the region of memory I think of as a reliquary. Precious but not to be fiddled with too often. On Tuesday at Kaboom Books here in Houston I was talking to the owner, John Dillman. For some reason the topic was the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I told John a friend and I cut school in the spring of our senior year in high school to attend the first Earth Day – April 22, 1970. In a downtown church, Ferlinghetti spoke and read some poems, of which I remember nothing.

Memory, of course, is a series of linkages. My talk with John reminded me that my brother once had a cat he named Lawrence Ferlingkitty, which I hadn’t thought about in years. Coupled with the nearness of Christmas another memory returned. My mother was a notoriously indifferent housekeeper. Clutter accumulated on every horizontal surface. We even felt sorry for the Christmas tree, freighted with too many ornaments, too much tinsel. One year, my brother and I bought a sack of hotdog buns and hung them all from the tree without telling anyone. No one noticed, not parents or visitors, so it became an annual tradition. That may be my favorite memory of my brother. The final stanza of Yeats’ “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”:

 

“I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind

That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind

All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved

Or boyish intellect approved,

With some appropriate commentary on each;

Until imagination brought

A fitter welcome; but a thought

Of that late death took all my heart for speech.”