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Family package

Patrick T. Reardon

I left my phone
on the back seat of a taxi,
and, when I borrowed one
from a cornrowed woman, gap-toothed,
the voice answering was
my dead Mother telling me
it served me right.

It was just a mistake, I said.

Your fault, she said from her ashes.
You were wrong.
You hurt your Father and me.
When will you learn?

I learned my lesson,
so did we all,
especially my brother,
until he’d had enough of lessons
and lessoned himself at his back door
in the snow rain of a 3 a.m. Saturday.

He called me from his ashes on my new phone
to say I was lost.

Yeah, I know.
I want you to find me, wherever you are,
but I don’t know the address.

I wanted him to see me that night
when I am in leftfield
in the high school yard
as the dusk deepens to dark,
running away from the plate,
my arms out fully,
my eyes awkwardly to the sky,
my fingers reaching,
the ball never arriving.

My brother and I,
cassocked, surplice boys bowing
for the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar,
fake Latin syllables we don’t understand.

I left the book of my life
on the back seat of a taxi
where a girl of six found it
and, unable to read the handwriting,
made it the Bible of her bookshelf,
the sacred mystery,
bleak and weighty in its chaos,
a formula beyond all divining.

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