Following the Brush, with One Name I Don’t Say

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Following the Brush, with One Name I Don’t Say

The last two chairs at the table 

face each other like rival hypotheses. 

We sit in neither. 

Dust conducts the meeting with admirable neutrality.

My sibling prefers the physics of denial: 

a closed system where no energy is lost 

because nothing is admitted. 

I bring conservation laws to dinner; he brings a lid.

Fact: memory is reconstructive. Each recall edits the file. 

We have become unreliable narrators of the same afternoon, 

co-authors who refuse to share a bibliography.

I inventory the dead—mother, father, elder brother, 

the cousins who used to laugh like loose change. 

Absence scales poorly; it makes our disagreement look large enough to live in.

He says, It didn’t happen like that. I say, It happened enough. 

Between those two measurements sits a gulf with excellent acoustics.

Life always allows digression: 

the hinge on the old door still squeals. I oil it. 

Mechanisms, when tended, accept correction. 

Blood, less so.

Humor, carefully: we are experts in non-apologies, 

fluent in the passive voice. 

Mistakes were made, by weather, by furniture, 

by the general atmosphere of being alive.

I draft a letter I will not send. 

It is precise as a lab protocol and just as likely to be contaminated by feeling.

Age advances like a quiet auditor. It underlines the columns: 

time remaining, words unspent, 

the cost of being right amortized over a shrinking horizon.

He keeps the story airtight; I keep it ventilated. 

One of us avoids drafts, the other avoids suffocation.

 Neither of us calls it love, though something stubborn breathes.

If reconciliation is a bridge, 

ours is all blueprint and no steel. 

Still, I carry bolts in my pocket, 

ridiculous with readiness.

Last note: I practice saying his name without flinching. 

It behaves like a small instrument—

temperamental, necessary—

waiting for a hand that will not pretend it was never dropped.

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My first crack at a Zuihitsu, a form I just learned of from those layered, introspective types at the DVerse Poets Pub.

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©2026 Christopher Reilley 

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