Counting Robins

By Cate Freeborn

The children die of typhus. The mothers, 
too. It’s a Wednesday 
when I dream of brother, & in my memory 
he is rawboned, his skin still jejune-pink: 
a brindle of black-fly kisses, a branding of grass clods. 
His white scalp, girdled with daisy links, 
is a communion wafer solvating on colorless 
tongue. I bridle my body in the chapel, 
extend forearms & raised palms. I pray; 

we pray together, the barn cats & I, shins lesioned 
by a carpet of thirsting straw. I proselytize myself
before the owls in the rafters, douse my worship in nine sets of 
golden eyes. There is a rupture in the tin roof
through which the moonlight falls in strands & 
silvers my skin sallow—the desiccated pallor of the moribund. 
The minister says brother is 
with the angels now 

& still I wake some mornings to robins throating 
like untuned flutes, plate my breakfast, & wonder if he is coming 
to eat, if he’ll want the milk, if he’ll race me in the pasture, 
will he win? I dust the back cupboards & think of those 
filthy hands, hard fingers siphoning half-purple hangnails; all his 
contusions & gleaming-mouth scars 
from play

when we played together, played in the lake, the cowpen, 
the upstairs attic. How I told him
when I was ten that I’d be his mother if ours died 
& he laughed &
said I’d never cook as well. Bathed his forehead when he 
got sick & dreamt the warm cloths 
were soaked in holy water, dreamt I could make him 
better, could still pretend to hate him 

because we had time for love 
& the learning of its weight.  In the barn I ask God
if my brother knows that he left; I ask
can he still remember me, 

does he know 
how I wanted him to stay? Does he know
I whispered 
I love you at his bedside, hoping it was a hymn? 
The minister says brother is 
in good health now & still some mornings 
I wake to hear the robins sing & for just a moment 
I let myself imagine it’s his voice.