“Plus, I wouldn’t,” he went on warning, “dive
into that bit about Queen
too soon,” giving a jerky heave
to his rake to uproot a flower mound,
my brother, who seemed pure muscle
to me as he toiled in the yard. As he toiled
out near the golf links fence, dividing thistle
from a rock bed, and rocks from the soil.
1983, I’d guess, and I’d just stumbled upon a link
between Auden’s elegy to Yeats, wherein ‘The mercury
sank in the mouth of the dying
day’ and, wouldn’t you guess it, Freddie Mercury;
the next day at school, I’d be giving a speech
precisely upon the matter:
upon Auden’s ‘wolves,’ which
howled like ‘the multitude there’
from Queen’s “The Prophet’s Song,”
upon Auden’s ‘snow’ that ‘disfigured
the public statues’ not a bit unlike Brian May’s ‘love gone
stale,’ not to mention, as I far as I figured
it, his ‘ice cold hearts’ or ‘the cold of night.’ Then, my brother added,
“As far as the ‘nurses and rumours’
part goes, or that ‘silence’ that ‘invaded
the suburbs,’ you’re better off using Rumours.”
Rumours, of course, by Fleetwood Mac
who (in 1984, when The Smiths
came on the scene) my brother would turn his back
on entirely, just as he’d do to The Smiths
in favor of—wouldn’t you know it—
Queen, in that unforeseen boost in sales
they enjoyed on the death of Mercury, lacking all muscle, whose face my brother lit
fire to later, a psychedelic poster, the details
of which, as a family, we still
debate. Though it’s safe to assume
my brother felt somewhat ‘in the cell
of himself’ and ‘convinced of his own freedom.’
