New Poetry: “To Infinity and Beyond” by Joel Anthony Harris

I have a running sore on my chest, a pockmarked full moon that waxes radiant in inconsolable bereavement. I bear it as a nursery swaddled in shade cloth to ditch the sun. It is my silent wound. My silent night. A silence etched into my being as a sinkhole without the finality of rocks or groundwater. Ten years. Ten years I’ve chugged along since leaving Mount Hope Hospital in a state of sog. I recall those moments in my mind. Replay them like vintage songs. My dear brother comatose lying supine on his hospital bed. Eyes shut. Skin: lukewarm. The full moon of an obstinate asthma congealing into a bubbly mucus creek, winding its way through lianas of matted dreadlocks. His face consoled with a Veronica’s Veil dampened in brotherly love. I remember the life support machine’s high-pitched bleeps, the nauseating hangover of the din lingering in the air, bombarding my eardrums, the echo ringing in my ears. A refusal to be merciful. A refusal to cease. Vertiginous valleys of green waveforms scribbling on the monitor, as if automatic writing during a séance. I beheld the seismology of pain distilled in a moana pregnant with white light. I was aid: airdropped in Hitchcockian suspense. I remember the little words uttered. The nurse’s blank face. The choreographed dance of evasions and half-answers that left me adrift between the rock of salvific hope and uncertainty. I remember my brother’s seeming disappearance, one fateful morning. The white sheets unslept in, unruffled. The open drapes motionless. I was a fleeting pilgrim in an eerie chapel of silence. I remember the doctor pulling my father and I aside. How the news was broken. How our worst fear was realized. My father’s unsentimental cool that betrayed foreknowledge. Knowledge of a failing heart a certain pre-existing condition. I remember too the slow trek to the morgue. My brother’s Antarctic body, tagged. Numbered. Statisticized. Still as a mill pond. Oh brother, we charted you through cocoa country. We shepherded you home. We waded through sand, stones, bottle shards and sea. To set you free. And you are to the sea what the snowy egret is to its wetlands. Feral and beauteous as dawn. Be like the unbounded sands wigging the abyss. Be like the salt and foam of waves tumbling against the shorelines. Be like a seraph: let your wings encircle the throne of this good earth. Soar heavenward, beloved daystar. To infinity and beyond—farewell.