Early Morning Call From Erath

I asked for 40 winks more, but she had her way with me, as she always does. Don't argue with the muse: "The ***** is always right," my brother would say in disgust about his third, and final wife. He's the guy who walked me down the aisle in a crowded church, and gave me as wife to his best friend, in lieu of a father, gone too soon. "I wish Daddy didn't die," he said, a grown man on the telephone in one of his late night phone calls, where I sat huddled in a blanket on the floor, listening to the lost child he would always be. He wore pinstripe gray on my wedding day, preempting the famous "Hucklebuck" as we christened the funky turquoise suit that lit up his blue eyes and golden Greek- god hair. He was the baby brother I raised after our mother left, leaving him back- stroking, forever seeking Jesus love in a sea of imperfect women. Ever the renegade, he took his married sister to his Senior Prom to whispers of impropriety, and glares from pretty girls who might have been his date. I was the big sister, glamourous in the simple, black moire' gown our aunt had made to take my freshman year at college by storm. Oh Yes! Brother above reproaches, gone ten years as your birthday approaches, I call (no area code needed) to say, in the 28 minutes it took to write this poem, maybe less than the time it takes to birth a baby, 'dare a la luz', red and screaming in his brand-new birthday suit, Poetry and you, brother, were labors of love. You: the most beautiful boy in the world.