that Sunday afternoon in Madison
when we went to brunch, then found our seats
in the theater where the French Revolution
is waging again and a man falls in love
and the woman dies and her daughter is horribly
enslaved, and my brother, a bear of a man,
the heavyweight champion wrestler who
routinely pinned behemoths to their backs
and threw keggers to “make me clean
the floors,” my brother beside me
cried enough tears for the whole globe,
a lightning rod for sorrow, as if his heart
were big enough to take on the burdens
of the whole world, how I loved him then,
his face radiant and glistening,
both of us weeping near to heaving
and holding each other’s hands, smiling
at each other in the dim light, both of us
seeing ourselves as the other as the players
built a barricade and all our walls fell down.