Residual

The Steelers are winning so I know it’s my brother
calling at quarter to midnight, Monday. Wind up
the oaks are dropping their small acorns on the roof
like the hard containment of a spring rain in single doses.

This late in the fourth I don’t answer the phone.
I turn the light out and the bright clouds surprise me.
The reflection from the slow turning wind-chime
makes think of ghosts. I lie still as the past washes.

There is a myth that the wind moving in the trees
is a spirit. My brother is lying in his room
with a IV drip in his arm. Once a week the nurse
arrives to change the dressing.

The trees bend under the spirit. All men are phantoms.
I know already that my brother
wants to say a few words about the rage
of the coach, the errors in the player’s virtues,

to describe the silent
balk of distance that separates the viewer
from the player’s violence as an order of corn.
When the spit flies from a coach’s mouth
it is referred to as “an order of corn”

sometimes Creamed Corn. The reference
of seed on the vine, the mystical ability
of life to become of itself through the grain
comes from the digestive encounters of corn.

Queen Elizabeth examining her first
phallic stalk could never have imagined
the lobbying efforts of bio-fuel companies,
the farmers interests and deforestation
necessary to bring about this tiny glint of joy

I can hear like acorns produced from the ghost
of wind on the roof, the distempered revelry
in my brother’s pain, of rage and therapy, bright green
cornstalks like the skin of the Incredible Hulk.