My Mother and Her Brother Timothy Dance at a Family Wedding (revised)

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,
pigs drowned in sucking mud, farm foreclosed, 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, through all that distance.