BRODIE   

  Brodie was alone at 
                the kitchen table in the big house 
                            at Saltgrass, eating a free man’s 
                                        lunch in his dirty coveralls when I 

  banged in cursing, wrecking the 
               calm. He looked up, innocence, 
                            from his sandwich of big slabs of
                                        cheese and pickles. Somehow, he had  

  learned already, in his twenties,
              in the years of his wooden-boat- 
                          building apprenticeship, that the angle
                                      of beauty and insight corresponds to 

  the angle of clear-sighted intent. 
               Mischief-maker, the sweetest 
                           of us all, with his slapstick grin 
                                       and Zenhearted clowning—it was he 

  who had discovered that the    
              new life we all dream of    
                           as invariably beginning with some   
                                        notion like leaping off the porch  

  and disappearing from the   
              present actually starts to come true     
                          when you turn and go inside    
                                      the house and lift your historical   

  body in your arms and    
              descend into the unfinishable     
                          past until finally you are walking    
                                       straight into the sky with empty   

  arms outstretched. Of course no      
              one knew that four years later      
                           he would be dragged exhausted into    
                                        freezing night waters off the coast of  

  Alaska by a running-out cable,     
              and that his body with its balance     
                           of the silly and the lovely and       
                                       the true would never be seen again,     

  leaving such a longing for his      
              name, ghostgrin of impudent      
                          grace. From his interrupted       
                                       lunch, he watched me with angelic      

  humor while I preened with fury,  
              having just spent twenty minutes     
                          on the gravel under my Toyota with    
                                       no talent or experience unable to  

  get a decent angle or clear  
              purchase on some bolthead  
                           but repeatedly trying the same   
                                       approach that didn’t work until cursing   

  I’d pulled my body into sunlight   
              and stood up, young and defeated,  
                          and stomped into the kitchen yelling   
                                      “Fine! I give up! I can’t do it! No 

  doubt you can do it! Fine!" and he  
              waited until I'd specified the precise   
                          nature and location of the problem,  
                                       whereupon, untouched by even   

  a shadow of my agitation, 
              he smiled, and said without pride  
                           or condescension, with the timing  
                                       of a saint: "There's a tool for that."