Under Blue Sky

On an early April afternoon
with ice shards of birdsong,
the pinched mouths of tree buds softly slackening,
my brother, twenty,
fired a gun and died.
I wasn’t there. When I talk of it,

a shot cracks the quiet upstairs.
The only witness, a tough neighbor kid
my brother had called to come over,
stood outside the locked back door.
Don’t come up, my brother yelled from the porch.
It’s gonna get a little messy up here.

A bullet is a period, penetrating
as the pupils of unblinking eyes.
Many Aprils later,
his eyes still stare from the police file’s
permanent dark.

A bullet is a period that punctuates
last words:
gristle of stereo static hanging in the room
after his last chosen CD played its last song.

A bullet is a period, more emphatic than
a body hanged in broken question
mark. Under blue sky,
the sound ripples through spring air,
ripples for years in widening shock
waves, a reverberation in bloom.