on family splintering: a meditation

if war had not broken out across the continents

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if war had not broken out in the family, between the brothers

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if Grandmother had not worshipped at the cocktail hour and not raised her boys in her own religion

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if she had not answered her country’s call to duty and had not, out of desperation, sent her boys off to war when they were but youngsters, one blue-eyed, one brown, one out to the sea, one into the air

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if her boys, still young, had not each seen and feared bodies fallen, broken, bloodied, blown into the sky or hurled to the depths

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if her boys had returned from war clear-eyed and whole, and each found amnesia for war in the same places that they found love and forgotten how war plundered souls

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if two women had not fallen, one for the blue-eyed boy, one for the brown, or if the women, starry-eyed, had not been oblivious to war, to ocean and how it roils, to wide-open sky and how it fades into nothingness, and if the women had understood that what lurks in the ocean and in the sky, the deepness and the emptiness, must be muted and that the sacred cocktail is as good a way as any to subdue the chasm opening up again and again in a man’s belly

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if the women had not left, taking children and the everydayness of dinners and bath times and bedtime stories, leaving behind the vastness and the emptiness alongside the empties huddled on the porches

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if these brothers, now fathers, could have let their children’s love heal the wars both outside and inside

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if the brown-eyed boy, father to his daughter, had not fallen into the infinite sky while searching for his mind, and if the blue-eyed boy, father to his daughter, had not fallen into the swirling sea while praying to the cocktail gods

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we might have met, saved each other, where the sea and the sky reach and touch, if not for the horizon receding, moving always further and further away

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