Sister Triptych
For
My Sister (For All My Sisters)
You
are such strong joy,
The fluttery barefooted one
Who’s always always always
Firmplanted & there
Watching me impale a shrimp
On the huge hook —
Fishing at the port in filmy haze.
Drop
it.
I’ll feel the pull of tiny stripping
Mouths like your own future baby/lover
Urgent at your breast.
The hook’s way too big
(Ambitions! Expectations!)
Comes up empty though the fish are full.
Goldenglow
sister,
Your wide china eyes have seen
All our errors under & over.
But hell, they suck you too &
Vicious little fish rend flesh.
Can’t touch the barbed steel core—
It’s both of us.
For
My Sister, Many Years Later
Emphatically
have your seasons passed
And not in silence—
In bursting ripeness, wide-hipped, fecund.
Wild gold children; plants with
Sturdy stalks.
Your plain sweeps broad and fair
With grain, nourishing, candid.
You are your man’s solace,
Your children’s strong safe
Everthere.
I
have no reason to doubt your happiness.
You who were a barefoot sunsprite;
Slender, generous—
You who soothed a jellyfish sting,
When we were children, long ago
In sunlight.
Emphatically
have your seasons passed
In love, and labour—
Content in your landlocked garden.
The salty wind of our childhood sea
Sighs warmly through your nursery.
Summerchild
Love
is bearing, violation, surrender.
It is a darkened, restless room and then
the flooding light after midday summer.
It is bodily fluids and their mixing.
It is nourishment.
You
are strong in the understanding of furrows,
of gestation through seasons, of bearing.
The woman who wipes away the birth-blood
from your thighs and the floor is not
your mother, nor your sister.
She
is a woman with no face,
like Saint Veronica. The Rorschach imprint
in your blood is from a boy-child,
son of growth and sweetness, now
lifted apart, away, separate.
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