The Loss that Changed Everything

This is what I remember,
the pencil sketches on newsprint
that I must translate.

I remember, five, you at two, brother,
the smell of your boy sweat hair,
the grasp of fingers into my shirt
as one we wrestled on a carpet, our imaginary sea.

I remember the morning a week later
you left me:
Father carrying me, whispering to me he loved
me, whispering of
Jesus,
whispering the stains of weeping
on his cheeks.
I remember someone visiting and
giving me a set of
over two
hundred
crayons which even then I thought a gift
too small to match
or burn
the loss.

But mostly I remember sitting in a small
rocking chair while the adults mourned,
hearing the wails and moans and mournings of a
cat that had
homed under our house and
wondering where they had hidden you
and if I could set you free.

I have been told not to write a confessional
because when you grow up,
nobody cares,
but this is for me finally and not
for them.