I remember my brother’s coffin
before it was lowered into the ground.
He was cremated.
His ashes placed under a maple sapling we planted.
Someone took scissors to my memory.
They collaged over one with another.
Maybe this dual remembrance is a casualty
of too many concussions.
I suffered three big ones over the years.
Maybe those residual blows dig holes in my brain.
Maybe grief of a lost loved one
digs a hole in the brain as well as the ground.
I feel your fingers filling the holes
like my brain is a bowling ball.
No. That was water filling the hole
with seasonal freeze and thaw cycles.
It is a long time extracting tears
from eyes told Big boys don’t cry.
I was not big at the time of my brother’s death.
But I was told that axiom anyhow.
Maybe those tears are the waters
that filled the brain holes.
Maybe my memories were printed
with water soluble ink
and bled into other memories
which explains my eating potato salad
at my brother’s grave side
in the shade of a maple grown tall.
copyright © 2021 Kenneth P. Gurney
Umflop 
This is a tough one. I was big-er when my brother died, and I noted that neither mom nor dad ever cried — at least in my presence. But where did the potato salad come from?
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The poem is about memory and how memories evolve and change as time goes by and we re-remember them. How they can merge with other memories to create scenarios that never happened.
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