Reginald Shepherd Another Letter of the Alphabet Here is your name, a stone on the tongue, here is your face, a mirror clouded over with significance. You never answered to the names I called you, never returned my late night calls. If I chose, I could recall your tones of voice, from your own lips, even. We sat on opposing sides of the same bed discussing Saussure's sign: sheer difference between us. I can't recall the blond gleam dusting your forearm, fool's gold when the sun breaks through accumulating clouds, the light you don't resemble reassembling after the severe storm watch. I'm not writing this at all, nothing you will read except to strangers who correspond to you, stranger I have called my loss instead of your name, caring too little to call it love (If I should tell a lie, if I should die before I wake...), to do anything but call, if I could find the time, if I weren't fine. After Catullus: Carmen Ci Tramping shattered landscapes and astray across inconstant seas, I'm summoned back, ghost brother, by these observances, to pay you final honors and address what's left of you: ashes and bone. Hades has taken you. Accept at least this sacrifice, sanctioned by ritual centuries: and these fraternal tears. For now, forever, stolen sibling, fare thee well. March Snow as Memory We left our footprints on a night like this after late snow, the moon a bloody pearl too far out of reach to string around the neck I tentatively stroked. Cold air held the touch in place, your hand took it away, but when you turned from counting constellations you were smiling. (How full your heart appeared then, hovering just over the horizon.) Tonight the wind brings word of melting weeks, one world not wrapped in white. From my doorstep to the far edge of the field fog rises from, the horizon is as wide as it has to be to hold the cold revolving distances you wander now, another's arm a necklace you wear as casually as grass wears mist. Reginald Shepherd's fourth book of poems, Otherhood , was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in spring, 2003.