at Length
Brother
Proem: Whose Story of Us We Is Told Is Us
Brother is we is each of us we ghosts
Brother of white folks we
don’t never known us brother we
Because we never doesn’t fits
Nowhere we brother
doesn’t fits in bodies
Our bodies we is always walking leaking
like a ghost can’t be a body in one place
But every eyes / Catches and pulls at it
Like every eyes in any
white folks is another
Hole in our bodies
Brother / Is we is never known them close
Up close whose ghosts we brother leaking is
Whose story of us we is told is us is water in a fist
Brother we not the fist
we not the water
we the thirst
1. The First Part of the Earth
We the thirst brother the
we water from the inside from the lips
From nowhere to the lips
We water inside brother we to say it water
from the inside
thirst and we / Can’t never have us like it’s
water got a color got a black
Brother we hungry water like
We was the first / Part of the Earth
It’s we don’t even know
How any we could satisfy our hunger what
Satisfy us because it ain’t / Was nothing here before us brother the
Thing meant to satisfy it come before
the hungry thing / So that the hungry thing will find it there
And known what it was for
2. The One Whose Mother Was Black and the One Whose Mother Was White
We known what it was for
and tell it brother let me tell it us / Was it was for
And in the morning of the sun in the rising sun / Our faces to the sun
Or let me tell it you was born
Brother was winter I had asked for you / Brother was spring the sun so much
it didn’t none of me believe the blue
Come out of the black
Brother until I was if I’m
A grown man now I thought the sky was two
skies let / Me tell it us two skies two brothers one / The black sky
one a color don’t come any part of black
Tell it we known what light
Was for
I can’t see in my skin our father’s face
3. Gone Sleeping in Me Till I Die
I can’t see in my skin our father’s face / Brother or any other face
Of any like me brother the same black
Brother you got his skin or his but dark-
er but it’s darker so it’s his
Darker from where
it’s in the first place black keeps black darker from where
It’s white or lighter from
black my whole families disappear / My mother’s and our father’s families they
The white ones and the black ones gone / Brother they sleeping
Gone sleeping in me till I die / Brother and it my skin turns gray and dust
No skin the family of my skin
And if my skin
separates me from you
brother it does not keep me
4. Keep Us
Brother it does not keep us brother it
Keep us like wind keep a tree a tree
Rooted and still get never any rest
Brother it I was raised to think Brazil
Our father he abandoned me
went to Brazil
Brother I’m sorry for the stories I was told
Brother the stories keep me even though I
Know they are stories even kept away / Our father him from him
Brother it keep us like a pond keep leaves
from trees on the pond they
Rotting in the thing they lived on
rot / So slow it’s almost like forever
Brother our father me and him / That’s how it love
keep us together
5. Chicken Bones Piled Up High
Keep us together brother is our bodies is a grave / Got piled up chicken bones in there
Brother is us our bodies is
the shards of them
Shards like they glass bad stuck
Bad shards of bone in the fried skin / Ate up so much of the skin we brother like
We ain’t got human bones no more / We got
chicken bones piled up high
Might as well wear a sign we got
Chicken bones piled up high / Get never any rest
from chewing night and day on glass / Chicken bones piled up high
brother is like we graves / Is we was born in bodies was
Graves first
like how we get our bodies if we ain’t
put chicken bones in it
6. Whole
Put chicken bones in it and watermelon bones / We brother we
water men bones / Is bones don’t say
or lift or drag our bodies under is
Our bones is masks
Give us deceiving shapes our bones is flesh
Give us the sameness we brother we got between us give
Us how we separate ourselves
Brother we water and our bones is rocks in us
We rivers and our bones is trash / Is sometimes bones themselves
from bodies thrown in is / Brother we borrow it
Is brother we to say we thought / To borrow it believed
to couldn’t grow no human bones ourselves
If we was given our whole lives
7. From Which Others
If we were given our whole lives / Brother if we
were given if / We given lives brother our even our
Lives is our even our
if we were given brother to / Live them a black
lives brother if / Black lives were not but would we want them
different were the
Standard the facelessness against
Which lives are measured facelessness
A white face even our / Brother if we were given
but we couldn’t be / Our lives the given from which others receive the gift
Nobody
brother gets it whole
But if we were would you / Brother I know it
I would
not grant that wholeness to anybody else
8. Blood Familiar
Anybody else / Brother I would more recognize myself
In anybody else brother except I see
My shoulders in your shoulders my
Body in your clothes but where your skin shows brother your
Face and your hands
your skin / Darker than mine
which drifts and changes in the sun
Your skin our father’s skin
brother my little brother your
Name his name the name he would have given me / If he had been allowed to choose
I recognize / My name when I hear yours
but when I see / Your face your hands
the hands I love the face I love the skin I love
Brother you are made strange by love
9. Asked
Brother you are made strange by love and was
Two when I asked for you our father for
You maybe I was three
was three I asked
Him for a brother brother by the time you came
Was three and gone had been / Taken away gone
by the time you came / To Texas by the time you came / Or his our father’s memory
He tells me he remembers me
Watching you in your crib
brother I don’t remember watching you
But grew up when I thought of you
Imagining you there / A baby I imagined looked like you
and that was who I grew up loving
And when I met you you were not my brother
10. His Face When I Was Looking
When I met you you were not my brother
Brother at sixteen you at thirteen brother when
I finally tracked our father down
After I tracked our father down my mother
She told me she had always seen his / Gestures in mine / In the way
I turned my head to look away
And she had never told me that before and said she always wanted to / Brother
I had no memories of you
No way to know or guess
No pictures of our father in the house / His
face when I was looking
your face when I
Had found you
I was raised an only child I didn’t think
To look in the mirror or to look away
11. Brother I Was Taken Away and Told Our Father Had Abandoned Me
My face our father’s when I look away / Or my
body your body when I move
Mine in the house alone / In the house I grew up in / Brother in the house not no one not
one brother one / Of any in the house one skin of any matching skin / Or tell
me brother what the difference is between / The body and the face / Looking
not any brother in the house / Not any blood / Or blood but not his blood
Brother not yours the difference between
Resemblance and resemblance brother since
your hands move like his hands or am I both
You and our father
rising do I rise
to walk away
12. We Become Impossible
Walking away / Or never when I pictured him
Walking just disappeared never just walking
out of the room / Our father when I pictured him
leaving my mother me
Pictured him brother disappeared / From the white room from the hospital was there
To see me born and after gone just vanished I was told
That story brother I was told
he didn’t come
The story changed
From year to year when I was growing / Up
brother till when people asked I said
I didn’t have a father he
became impossible
Brother I don’t
visit because I can’t
I do not have a father and I love him
Coda: Love Between Men
I don’t brother I do not have a
brother we’s / Ghost makers any bringing babies
Into this world
brother it was my
Great-uncle wrestled the gun from my mother’s father’s hands
The day her family got the news
Brother it was my great-uncle it was a
Tenant he had evicted this was years / Later
from the window of an empty
Apartment shot him through the neck
He wrestled the gun from my mother’s father’s hands
Brother and you were born
And blood sprayed from the artery
A rose
like if the Lord had stopped
making in the middle of mak-
ing red
roses
and never made their boundaries
Shane McCrae is the author of Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), as well as two chapbooks. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American Poetry 2010, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat and others. In 2011, he received a Whiting Writer’s Award.
The first poem in this sequence (“Proem: Whose Story of Us We Is Told Is Us”) first appeared on The Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. The second (“The First Part of the Earth”) was originally published in Gulf Coast.