Napoleon is gone now, but that day he wasn’t gone.
A profound statement (written in pencil,
on the back of a small, slightly bent,
black and white snapshot with wavy edges)
which spreads like pond ripples through my imagination,
making my eyes water,
giving phrase to all which once was
and now is no more on this earth,
including my brother, who wrote it.

More than the life of a horse summed up in one brief line,
It conjures up visions of my past,
and of a past I never knew,
and fills my head with delicious nostalgia
and with dreaded apparitions.
It is a brief and fiercely direct route
back into another time:
Now he isn’t; now he is.

It speaks volumes of life and death,
of the passing of time, of the undulations
of plowed black dirt on an East Texas farm.
It holds promise to me of a story, of stories,
which I long with all my heart to hear
and yet which are just out of earshot—forever.

I grab at it, gasping, about to understand, to remember,
and then it dips back into wherever it came from.
I grab at the thought in the same manner
I try to grab at the concept of Dan now gone.
Napoleon is gone now, but that day he wasn’t gone.