———-—for Casey

says my brother’s death
it’s not personal
it’s not midnight, a thin coyote
panting in a dust-choked crater
its yelps all
loss loss loss

& anyway
it’s not about you
cathemeral grief
everything’s fine
not you, but the housing
market, ETFs,
someone’s 401k

it’s how they engirded him
behind garden walls
concrete & iron
illness & moonlight
how he gathered his shadow
like an evening gown
& dissolved from the cell

what a way to go
siloed high up
like he was
on narrow, nodding
fluted stalks
riding fat heads
of psychosis in bloom

Sleep

says my brother’s death
& I wake naked
on bamboo sheets
through the window
a sunrise of orphans
hills plowed raw

 

 

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Seth Clabough lives in an old farmhouse near a peach orchard in Greenwood, Virginia, and on Hatteras Island, North Carolina. He teaches at Randolph-Macon College and spends his free time renovating old properties and traveling. This poem is about the author’s brother, the prolific writer, scholar, professor, and editor Casey Clabough, a treatment-resistant schizophrenic who hung himself while held in solitary confinement, unable to get his meds adjusted or see his family. Casey’s manuscript about his experience with schizophrenia and the history of that disease is currently seeking publication.