HOME | GUIDELINES & CONTESTS | ART GALLERY | SUBSCRIBE My Brother, Antonio, the Baker Philip Levine Did the wind blow that night? When did it not? I’d ask you if you hadn’t gone underground lugging the answer with you. Twenty-eight years old, on our way home after a twelve-hour shift baking Wonder Bread for the sleeping prisoners in the drunk tank at the Canfield Station dreaming of a breakfast of horse cock and mattress stuffing. (Oh, the luxuries of 1955! How fully we lived— the working-classes and the law-abiding dregs— on buttered toast and grilled-cheese sandwiches as the nation braced itself for paté and pasta.) To myself I smelled like a new mother minus the aura of talcum and the airborne, acrid aromas of cotton diapers. Today I’d be labeled nurturing and bountiful instead of vegetal and weird. A blurred moon was out, we both saw it; I know because leaning back, eyes closed on a ruined sky, you did your thing, welcoming the “bright orb” waning in the west, “Moon that drained down its silver coins on the darkened Duero and the sleeping fields of Soria.” Did I look like you, my face anonymous and pure, bleached with flour, my eyes glistening with the power of neon light or self-love? Two grown men, side by side, one babbling joyfully to the universe that couldn’t care less, while the other practiced for middle age. A single crow settled on the boiler above the Chinese restaurant, his feathers riffling, and I took it for a sign. A second sign was the couple exiting the all-night pharmacy; the man came first through the glass door, a small white sack in hand, and let the door swing shut. Then she appeared, one hand covering her eyes to keep the moonlight at bay. They stood not talking while he looked first left, then right, then left again as flakes of darkness sifted upward toward the streetlight. The place began to rumble as though this were the end. You spoke again, only this time you described someone humble walking alone in darkness. I could see the streetcar turning off Joy Road, swaying down the tracks toward us, its windows on fire. There must have been a wind, a west wind. What else could have blown the aura of forsythia through the town and materialized one cross-town streetcar never before on time? A spring wind freighted with hope. I remember thinking that at last you might shut up. An old woman stood to give you her seat as though you were angelic or pregnant. When her eyes spilled over with happiness, I saw she took your words to heart as I never could. Maybe she recalled the Duero, the fields asleep in moonlight, maybe the words were music to her, original and whole, words that took her home to Soria or Krakow or wherever, maybe she was not an old woman at all but an oracle in drag who saw you as you were and saw, too, you couldn’t last the night.