My heart's turned to coal and my brain to ash

My brother's oldest and closest friend has died. He was Staff Sergeant Wesley Black; he was killed by the burn pits of the war he came home from and by the VA which did not admit the possibility of his cancer until it was terminal. My brother drove to Vermont to say goodbye to him last night. He was last seen by the rest of us on the inaugural episode of The Problem with Jon Stewart, discussing his own death with other affected veterans and their families. And the troops are out of Afghanistan and George W. Bush is alive and profiled for his paintings and I will never see the kid who ran home with his hair freezing because he had stomped on a reservoir in winter to free the muskrat he was afraid was trapped under the ice. Two different governments pulled him out of college to fight their wars. After his first deployment, when we were still hoping there would not be a second, I gave him a CD of The Widow's Uniform (1996) and he recognized the barrack-room ballads at once. He used Tolkien as a language for his own experiences in war. All this afternoon waiting for news I had "In Western Lands" circling in my head with "The Widow's Party." For him I wrote poems of the war so-called on terror. I wanted him to outlive it. He leaves, as they say, a wife and son.