Here's a new poem just published in CHINA GROVE literary magazine, about my brother and I flinging stones at each other, and what happened:
The Achilles Stone
We were laughing, my brother and I,
flinging pebbles at each other in the gulley—
high, errant arcs holding little chance
of damage.
Such fierce happiness—
pretending to be warriors in battle
lifting, ecstatic, the still angelic muscle
of my arm as it grasped another small stone
then another. The spherical density winging,
falling from an apex somewhere
in the immense safe sky, till
I glimpsed the rogue geometric tilt
of this one rock downward,
just escaped from my sinless fingers,
and cried out,
Run!
He looked at me, still laughing—
and in that eternity
before the oblong stone found
the soft tuft of my brother’s
skull
I knew for the first time
what was at stake in this world.
Loving
even the blood that ran down his face
as we stood staring,
his rock slipping
from thumb and forefinger
with his body
to the dirt.