He has always been foreign territory to me,
A capricious landscape I could never survey,
All despite his former proximity;
Or at least a dependable presence in early memory.
There he resides, there we reside, unadulterated
By the pain of loss or sting of knowing discontent.
Before the violence, before the flood,
Before I understood the difference between now and then,
Then and now; all resolving down to the matter
Of how we remember what we’d rather forget.
I could render a personal halcyon of that early period,
As if the roots latent there didn’t anticipate what came thereafter;
As if he was ever there to begin with;
As if history was amenable to dissonance.