Vespers (56) - for Tommy Murphy

My brother is in town, my brother's visiting,
night smooths across itself, each
conversation filled with pivotal
arrangements, each a sweet
young policy, and God,
awake now, offers summer at a time
when whispers offer to remake an afternoon
into another breeze with / without light.

My brother, once hinged to insomniatic living
I have claimed, redeems a light I keep
inventing. I am home because he's in my home.
I am awake to the involuntary / voluntary
happiness that he evokes.
It is in syllables that we find blessings
full of color, full of pleasure, filled with
flights that lift us to first heaven
as response to better ways of finding
a redemptive pause in this
form of an informal daylight
that amounts to nightfall, too, a state
of generous circumference of tulips
in the already pretty yard.

My brother transcends inference. When he is here,
the story is already in our cells, and I retell it
for the language that he understands. We need no words.
We love them anyway, for we are wearing these
ingenious sentiments along
with ways of life that blend with all eternity.
There are intentions that remunerate
the flight from quiet and the presence
of unplanned eternity.
We find enough to locate depth
within no depth at all.
That anyone who had a mind
to have recited would have found
in syllables, in threads, in practiced
answers to inform our happiness.