Daniel Tobin
Elegy Where does it come from now—disturbance of the air, your voice a breath of wind, muffled hum strained for through years like gauze, or sound waves caught in skull’s resonant bone? My voice or yours? If yours, barely audible, still it breaches the passage, thrums inside, takes its shape at the ear’s forge and hurtles for the curled shell of sound, for the labyrinth: Once you had a brother, that child at prayer in the old print you kept on your dresser, forever posed in his first communion suit, black hair combed back, his face so like yours he could be my brother, his hands a church, folded temple from which rosaries hung their given cross. You held those small hands rounded by life that were surface to me. What you could not see was the bone’s process, the knot of poison in the honeycomb where temporal plate meets cartilage, and his absent future like a depth-sounding through fathoms of your life, incessant tune played and played again in some dark chamber. Did you blame yourself? Did I become him, crammed in the carriage, belated infancy?—
236 ◆ Crab Orchard Review