At the Park on the Edge of the White River

My brother’s breath stops when he sleeps—
his rest is not rest—which means this moment
we’ve taken to talk, just the two of us,
suffers beneath the filmy layer of his exhaustion.
His eyes gaze down, shoulders curving toward
each other like it takes work for him
to hold his chest together. The boat
of his brow adrift in a pond of sweat.
He perks up to watch someone tubing downstream
and I watch with him. We see this man drink,
glide, and disappear along the water. We hear
two women walking on the path behind us,
their talking bright and trailing. Some sort of flower
grows on the cliff’s border and a bird flies
overhead, skimming the river. My brother
stays quiet, glancing down again. The thick
black waves of his beard a meadow at night
where there are no lightning bugs to clarify it.
I can’t tell if he wants me to speak
or not. What does hang in his face,
between the grass of his chin and his forehead’s
stagnant water, are his eyes which still
study something below both his chest
and his feet, a thing lower than this maroon
bench, in the dirt where he’s let whatever
it is fall, and though I swear I had paid
such close attention to him, he
surprises me with what I miss in the midst
of my caring. It’s his weeping.
It’s my brother weeping.