Altitudes and Contours

I was flying when my brother died,
winging into another dawn
trying to save him.
The sky cracked, a bitter pot
over the old wooden earth,
the day as black as burnt timber,
the rocks once amber, darkened,
the sun a lowering star of ash.
I heard the white coyote that dawn,
those cantos, those lieder
upon hills where other dead roam,
the nights of Spain
as silent now as bone
fallen into the dreams of lilacs,
old companion, brother, hermano!
It was a warm month,
his Schubert still played
in his rooms
and when I landed
at a weed-grown field
to call his home I heard
the impromptus and sonatas
singing through his house
telling me he had died
among the soulful aunts
and gibbering neighbors.
I told them that I would be along
and once again aloft
followed the old woods
and desperate ravines
where we camped by mountain fires
and heard the white coyote at daybreak
recalling how we had chased in the plane
a fox across the plains at Zuni
on a winter day.
I banked then away
to touch earth again
at a distant place.
They would wonder where I was
as I sat among strangers
and maps, fingering altitudes
and contours, seeking answers
without questions,
solutions without puzzles.