A Recovery Artist

Kafka’s Gregor’s sister “was of contrary opinion.”
Some investigators bring other contraries: a sister
wants to rail against a sister, a mother against a lost son
- the sun very much against the moon in the feeble insomnia
the writer has mailed to another writer, a recovery artist
mailing chapters to recovery artist, the black letter of a
Z among other black letters and numbers and diagrams
in an old notebook. Am I not myself if I am contrary to language?
Am I not myself as some dog you painted? But you must not do
too much, stand too long, caretake too long when one should be
standing like myself beside the brick of the school wall,
the elementary school in the elementary evening, waiting
the arrival of the lost brother to convince him at last of his bad memory,
his devotion to something he knows not yet, something
physical and spiritual and sudden like insomnia – at the same time
waiting for his closeness whether it is “to you.” Tell him his closeness
could be for the sun or the moon and it would not matter –
you can even tell him you passed an old friend and something came back to you –
tell him it resisted closeness but seemed like it wanted to be of that current.
No box of recovery. No rearranged ride. No ghost behaviors. No umbrella.
Tell this brother of yours you are now his sister, the end of a letter in the end of a
Tree at the end of the block. Your wings are real, in the shapes of Z and if.
There is mo prior melody or rejection. Your wings are his wings. Tell him.

Michael Burkard teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University - Nightboat Books will publish his New and Selected Poems in 2007.