"Mythic," A Visual Poem

With thanks to the man attending the cash register at the antique store in Bend, Oregon who let me have this old picture for free.

Text of the poem:

                                        Mythic

My little brother was the hope of our family.
I admit I always thought him a bit foolish.
And perhaps he thought me too severe.
I was always trying to get people to think more 
existentially, as it were. 
Which I still believe must be done, 
otherwise we won’t be long for this world.
My brother saw the good in everybody,
to the point where he must have thought my kind 
of talk to be describing quite an unreality. 

My mother hoped the child 
would keep my father further at bay. 
My father hoped for a winning son and a kind of eternal life for himself. 
I hoped him to be an unbreakable toy, and later, 
a moldable partner to my projects. 
I find it now, that the hope each of us put 
in this child was not unlike the hope of the world 
entire in the myth of human progress. 
Perhaps it is clear to all of us now 
where such watered-down hope leads. 

The house my brother and I both were birthed in 
and which bore witness to our many boyish fights, 
kept secret our special playthings, 
the deafening, lonely silence of its hallways 
broken only by asynchronous ticking clocks and 
the reverberations of our parent’s arguments, 
the mighty walls of books preoccupying my time 
and sending my mind off to other worlds 
more alive and real and comprehensible, 

the house outlived our parents, 
it outlived my little brother, 
but, finally, it did not outlive me. 

The dark, thin automatons 
found the statues of ash 
my family was transmuted to 
in what remained of the house. 

Our parents were still lying in bed. 
My brother was huddled beneath the baby 
grand piano. 

It was a rainy morning when I stood outside 
the gate, surveyed the blasted scene, 
and watched the metal-workers dismantle 
the place stone by stone, 
as the dust turned to mud.

They took that little bit too.