The Gulf of Blues

On the other end of the line he sounds like my brother but is my father telling me about Coony who is fat. His whole body like a stomach round all round, fat even on his head. Eighty and heavy. How he joked Coony about his weight, joking him about a tow truck he’d need to haul him out of the tub like an old sunken ship pulled out of the gulf of blues, leaving whirlpools in the porcelain. “Quit all that eating and drinking,” my daddy say he said to him. “Quit pointing in that garden and reach down to get it.” My daddy say he joked him, ribbed him good. (And I know my daddy laughed gap-toothed, his mouth, throat, chest, and gut wide open for the signifying jest. His gray hair striking back time.) He sounds like my brother when he was a little boy, digging in the encyclopedia for the cause of something obscure, occult, trying to figure out how old Coony slipped in the bathtub that was always there and died like that. Baby Sister called to tell it first and she wasn’t joking after all like my daddy thought she was, Death a sad trick children pull. On the other end of the line my father sounds like my brother now. I know how Dying, bitter or tender, is the dark water that keeps us young. And this gulf of blues, deep and shiny, the only place to be between Time and Eternity.