My Mother and Her Brother Timothy Dance at a Family Wedding

Meningitis shook them both when they were children, and perhaps
that’s where it started -- the hand that touched my mother
and said spared, the fingers of scar that opened
in her brother’s brain. As if he's chosen,
life closes in past any chance of luck:
the army, epilepsy, a young wife
swallowed in madness, three half-orphaned boys, the pigs
drowned in sucking mud, the farm foreclosed, the taxmen
knocking. He comes to the wedding
in church boots and snapped shirt, on a day pass
from the VA. He's bleeding internally,
anticonvulsants built up like grease
inside his body. He's dizzy, but when the band
starts Waltz Across Texas my mother lifts him
and with his mouth in her hair they sway together,
like children, through all that distance.