Eulogy For A Dead Record

by Adam Yoe

My favorite album of all time, Hum’s landmark “You’d Prefer An Astronaut”, was released on April 11th, 1995. Lack of knowledge, exposure, and money invariably always found me thumbing through budget bins and it was there I found my first copy. A litany of mixed-media based tragedies have forced me to since repurchase the album multiple times.

I knew the album immediately and it managed to be one of the sole tethers that kept a younger me on Earth. It’s cosmic. It’s simultaneously hefty and weightless, graceful and shy in its ambition. It was my Bridge To Terabithia. It’s not my desert island disc, it’s the island itself.

As is often the case with first loves, our drift was slight and began an unnoticeable sidestep towards the shinier, unknown versions of ourselves until the gap was ultimately continental.

Every few years, I’d return to the densely packed album, rife with space metaphors of love, longing, fear, and loss I’d yet to engage. Again it’d steal me into its folds.

August 10th, 2015 was to be the eve of once again seeing Hum live, after a 17 year drought. I did the cursory day before listen as one does. The day was unremarkable in the standard, unremarkable ways that mark unremarkable days. I hiked. I got coffee. I watched the Orioles game and, at 10:15, I received a phone call informing me that my brother was dead. As things begin, things end. Not so much in the sweeping, slow pan epic that cinema has grown us to expect, but in the inherent cruelty of time’s continuance. The sheer shock of refusal of time to stop in a pause of genuflection silently as your grief swallows a family whole. The stinging shock of the mundane returning dutifully to remind you that you’re still alive.

I haven’t listened to the album since, yet it saves me every day. Just as my brother and our loved ones die again every day upon our lucidity at waking. In love, I share a poem I wrote for and about my brother inspired by Hum’s 1995 “You’d Prefer An Astronaut.” In keeping with their thematic sensibilities, picture my sweet brother Jason as the intrepid traveler, the reluctant sacrifice, the inadvertent deserter...

I’m grateful to share it in Yer Scene, a group of wonderful, emotionally available human beings that give far more than they could possibly know. I’m still a fan first.

were any of this true, were you not dead

I'd cast you, brother, the failed cadet

marooned, adrift amongst the nebula

were you not dead

were you not dead

we'd search you out

left navigating blindly, following

the sole star in a swollen sky

we walked years only to find

the star had long since expired

pointing us onwards towards

the detritus of a space station, abandoned,

blinking not of utility but obligation...

somewhere in this cosmic flotsam is a boy

once so wholly occupied

now a floating and brittle husk

of what one ultimately becomes

as if predetermined, your drift was destined

to be of the eternal sort

it's suddenness a ruse of the temporary

leaving us to fumble

in the muddled traffic

of a grief

recalculating

where were you when the world became ice?

were you a family of glass huddled?

locked in an embrace or just a collective, bracing

failing to become the August thaw

were you not dead but death

death has a way of inserting itself

and our silence protects us from nothing

yet we still lower our voices around death even

as we climb into night as we all must

laughter was once our shared alien dialect

now my comfort is a trespass of sorts

a masquerade in the key of healing

one doesn't so much get better as they do older

and I'm still in search

clutching to my breast

a poorly rendered sketch of the old man

into whom you'll never graduate

and

were none of this true

had no not found space

instead August 10th, 2015 found me

on earth

I yawned

a dog barked

the phone rang

a star went out

my brother telling me

the no's unwilling to push the words away

a contaminant

the last of us had died

away from me your body pinwheeled

defiant in its disregard for gravity

the hose detached

your tank emptied

you removed your helmet

each day I reach but fail

to reel you in, to pull you down

your weightless acrobatics a freedom

you never had alive

each day

I'm left shaken

by the seismic artifact

of your absence.

You'd prefer an astronaut.

-Adam Yoe