My Brother’s Scar

Abstract

Some calls aren’t even close, like when the tumor they said was benign wasn’t. Never mind how this could happen to you. Now the rotten part of your lung is gone. Below your shoulder blade it looks as though a giant compass planted one foot, and with the other slowly traced a half circle. Insert a wing there and you’d be half angel, a child again leaving angel imprints in the snow. I see the transfiguring scar, how it mimics the arc of an angel’s arm in a baroque painting. Robust, it reaches upward, extending the arc with trumpet raised. The sky’s pitch dark; it’s the day to end all days. That arm, all ivory, in the painting’s heady gloom astonishes. Once again the angels win, and your scar, its sideways, crazy smile, declares you one of them. Marianne Burke