TEN YEARS APART

You saw scandal in the tiny pink oval
poking through my sock.
Waterfalls terrified with their white-lioness roar
and you always held my hand
tightly in the park, in case the pigeons or
squirrels chance to feel gregarious.

I'd bring a hibiscus, and when you'd wanly smile
My fingers would dutifully dissect the fusia glory, and I'd watch your mouth,
hoping you'd be impressed by the pistil and elegant stamen
(and hoping just a little you'd be impressed that i remembered the difference)
But the orange-golden velvet dust angered your dress-front with familiarity
so we'd go home.

What would you be like if Gabriel had married you?
Not my gargoyle, guardian older sister.
I think you'd plunge through the brambles for blackberries too,
because he's fond of jam,
and the fragrance of my wet-moss garden
would remind you of mermaid's hair & other fabulous
and magical things he used to paint.

Now look at her, at her un-uncovered ruby-redness. She still hides and lies long buried;
and though I admire her & think her beautiful and careful,
my ten-year-old testimony is not heavy enough to mint,
so my unwedded sister refuses to spend.

For Destiny (who needs a good teacher)

I have seen you, with the hard eyes
watching the boys shoot hoops
and not even flinching when asphalt & skin meet.

teach me.

teach me how to hold in the tide
conquer and quell and wrest back
the suprised cry
and tears.

teach me, you with the hard eyes, teach me how to suffer.

Teach me the art of the careful harvest. I do not want to share my pain
the lighting striking long lasting sharp encounters with reality.
I have hands, show me how to handle these things.
I want to hold them like you do,
careful lips pressed together, and the hard
eyes that watch
details
and learn so much, with out giving away anything.

teach me, o hard-eyed woman, teach me how to survive.

Apart

the covers are the same leather, only Em dyed hers with pokenberries from the back yard, and i left mine dusty brown. the pages of her journal are inked over in love notes and sonnets and tearful lonely nights and dress designs & pieces of rose petal fall out everywhere and she clutches it close and it matters. mine smells like the print shop and is smudged and misspelled and i write about calving season and old man Huckers' new house and the first dandelions and last week's outrageous grocery bill. I marvel at Dante and Plath and Rice, and a world where hunger and happiness share the same sidewalk. my journal has words like "prodromic" and "palimpsest" underlined because there are so many more questions than why did you leave me alone?

Blue Springs: after the history tour

Summer was thick upon the Thursby house. Spanish moss dripped motionless from the ponderous live oak by the porch, in whose shade sat a lone man in a rocking chair. His face was as creased as the bark of the tree, and he was quiet.

It was always this way by mid summer in Velusia. The town was enveloped in the July heat like an ant in amber. They say that after God finished laying out the Fifty States, he went back to smooth them over some. Alaska and its kin gave him no end of trouble, and the Carolinas and Virginias had some stubborn creases that wouldn't lay right. He got so all-fired frustrated with Tennessee and parts of Georgia that he went and heated up his iron again--stuck in right up next to the fire and let it set. It got red-hot and he came back. But he couldn't figure where to begin, the whole mess of 'em were so puckered and hillocked. While he was figuring, he done set that iron right flat on Florida and its been hot and steamy ever since.

His heels and the rocker, the infrequent red-throated flair of a basking lizard from the leaves of the camilla bush, the far-off gurgling of the head spring - for Walter, time hung in the air as a dusty haze. In the porch shade he sat and rocked and looked out on the yard, its sandy stretches tremulous with heat and waves of memory.

The freeze of 1895.
the manatee chasing of his childhood.
traveling to Ocala.
the new general store and Uncle Tyler's automobile.

"I've been beginning things all my life."