Showing posts with label siblings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label siblings. Show all posts

7/12/22

The Derelict - Sharon Olds

He passes me on the street, his hair
matted, skin polished with grime,
muttering, suit stained and stiffened—
and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a
sign of beauty and power. But his hands,
strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and
flap slightly as he walks, like hands of
someone who has had polio, hands
that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his
piss, I see the ingot of his beard,
and think of my younger brother, his beauty,
coinage and voltage of his beard, his life
he is not using, like a violinist whose
hands have been crushed so he cannot play—
I who was there at the crushing of his hands
and helped to crush them.

1/30/19

COLLECTING FUTURE LIVES - Stephen Dunn

Now that everybody was dead
only he and his brother knew
the blood secrets, the unequal
history each nervous system
keeps and rehearses
into a story, a life.
Over the years they’d agreed
to invent and remember
a long hum of good times,
love breaking through
during card games,
their father teaching them
to skip stones
under the Whitestone Bridge.
The smart liar in them
knew these stories
were for their children
who, that very moment
over dinner, were collecting
their future lives.
But sometimes
in their twice-a-year visits
late at night
when their wives had tired
of the old repetitions,
they’d bring up the silences
in the living room
after a voice had been raised,
father’s drinking, mother’s
long martyrdom before the gods
of propriety and common sense.
In their mannerisms
each could see the same ghosts.
And if they allowed themselves
to keep talking,
if they’d had enough to drink,
love would be all
that mattered, the love
they were cheated of
and the love they got,
the parental love
that if remembered at all
had been given, they decided,
and therefore could be given again.

10/3/18

VOLUNTARY - JR Walsh

My little sister said why a lot. Why this? Why that? Why everything.
My father said, Stop trying to answer every question every time.
So I said, She wants to know why so I’m telling her.

My father said, She doesn’t care. It’s involuntary.
She’s two years old and wants you to talk to her.
I’m tired of both of you. 

I didn’t ask why. 

My father left for work.
My sister wanted to know why.
So I said, To get away from you.

Then my mother said, Why’s your sister crying?
I didn’t answer why.
Maybe my father was right.

9/7/16

BROTHER - Richard Shelton

you still carry
your guilt around for company
I will not deprive you of it
but I have an empty space
where my hate lived
while I nursed it
as if it were a child

brother my only
brother it was too late for us
before we were born

it was too late
before you learned to be brutal
and I learned to be weak

your childhood
was a hallway of doors
each closing just as you
got to it
but I was younger
and all the doors were closed
before I could walk

how could I have expected you
to save me when you could
not save yourself

brother my only
brother if not from you
from whom did I learn
so much despair

I went in search
of a father and found you
with a whip in your hand
but what were you searching for
in such dark places
where I was searching for love

1/15/16

Animals - Louise Glück

My sister and I reached
the same conclusion:
the best way
to love us was to not
spend time with us.
It seemed that
we appealed
chiefly to strangers.
We had good clothes, good
manners in public.

In private, we were
always fighting. Usually
the big one finished
sitting on her little one
and pinching her.
The little one
bit: in forty years
she never learned
the advantage in not
leaving a mark.

The parents
had a credo: they didn't
believe in anger.
The truth was, for different reasons,
they couldn't bring themselves
to inflict pain. You should only hurt
something you can give
your whole heart to. They preferred
tribunals: the child
most in the wrong could choose
her own punishment.

My sister and I
never became allies,
never turned on our parents.
We had
other obsessions: for example,
we both felt there were
too many of us
to survive.

We were like animals
trying to share a dry pasture.
Between us, one tree, barely
strong enough to sustain
a single life.

We never moved
our eyes from each other
nor did either touch
one thing that could
feed her sister.

12/11/15

The Untrustworthy Speaker - Louise Glück

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.
In the end, they're wasted--

I never see myself,
standing on the front steps, holding my sister's hand.
That's why I can't account
for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless,
we're the cripples, the liars;
we're the ones who should be factored out
in the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas
red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
to the older daughter, block her out:
when a living thing is hurt like that,
in its deepest workings,
all function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
is also a wound to the mind.