Still Trying
By: Eugene Marckx
We should have known when he sold his sailboat
he couldn’t live there anymore – afraid he might
slip off “into the drink” – we should have known
One time on the phone he let slip that he’d fallen
in the grocery parking lot and needed help to his car
“Don’t you have someone nearby you can call?”
I was afraid for him – he quit calling then
except on my birthday – two days late in a slur so bad
I had to play the voicemail over and over to decipher his words
I called him back but did that ever work?
His voicemail was always full – no memory left
Our sister in town talked with him daily – but that too stopped
I drove down and with her sitting in the car
I knocked in a winter drizzle on his locked door
then found a window propped open four inches for air
and his Jack Russell terrier frantic in there to escape
– licking and scratching my hand – my brother ten feet away
on the couch with no resurrection left in him
yet he could still turn the air blue with enough vitriol
to cover his shame at my arrival
After an hour of pleading with him I got the picture
He couldn’t stand on his feet but he sure wasn’t gonna crawl
What then?
As I drove away my sister’s eyes closed in
We both could see a forecast of pelting rain
scourging that swollen river into darkness
But it didn’t end quite this way – a friend of his said later
he tried to quit cold turkey – no – the friend pleaded
knowing his body couldn’t take the withdrawal
Only then could I begin to see how hard he tried –
the lonely agony of emptying himself of that swollen river and
dying of it
But that he died trying stays in me now
and I have a small hope it may be said of me after I’m gone
– he died trying – this brother of mine
deep down showing the way
Eugene Marckx: I spent my employed life working in a large bakery and raising five children in a marriage slowly failing. My fiction comes from uncomfortable questions arising in the aftermath. I’m a storyteller and a poet, and I finished a novel, “Broken Charlie,” about the wholesale clear-cutting of
Western forests. In 2018 two of my poems appeared in Terrain.org. Another is in a new anthology from Empty Bowl Press, “I Sing the Salmon Home.”