Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet

You Were There

| 48 You Were There in memory of Hilda Fay, the half-sister i never knew You were there all along— you were the room we never opened, the song no one remembered the words to—other half of my loneliness, the detour he took and then denied. In a three-ring blow-up pool I skim the bottom, eyes open, swim through rings of my own breath, seeking a new route into the haunted heart. What to do with a sister unveiled thirty years later by telephone? Mother’s vengeance no doubt—a secret sister—must be put away like the Madam Alexander doll with perfect curls no one was allowed to even touch. But you were there all along, faded square in the photo album—packed in tight with peony buds cracked open 49 | in a hushed deflowering. A page of crippled fractions—I’m learning to subtract and divide—to take away and to carry—but none of this helps to fill the hole—he is the maestro. The new-book smell chokes me. You are the one divided—a shadow equation with no sum, the square root of loss—he taught us long division and no way to save the remainders. A letter waits unclaimed—hovers in a postal holding pattern, filed in the dead-letter slot—as if asleep. With covers over her head, she sleeps far away in patent-leather shoes. She dreams of boats and trains in sets of two. He sleeps in his own holding pattern and dreams also of trains—steaming backward and lost luggage because the map of his heart is folded and creased from his journeys—because he was always set to leave at a moment’s notice, and he knew he could because of his gift for magical history. | 50 A U-Haul passes in green smoke of the dinner hour. I curl my toes hard into the hooked rug, lock fists around arm rests, holding on as if all this could rise in a blink, hover, and then touch down in Idaho—time to make a new life—time to use the new name, time to trade Green Stamps for that double bypass, the one where your heart is pulled out and flipped like a coin directing us north, south, anywhere away from that hollow draining. You were the sister I wanted to fight with, to call into jump rope songs, to touch the sky with, to wash the spiders off—Shabushka, Shabushka, Shabushka. But cypress, spruce, and larch scrape the wind between us, reach higher into the distance, spearing the dust that holds us apart. Now we are two boats navigating with memorized charts, birds pulling us in separate directions—one builds 51 | a mute nest of bone and twigs, soft as gauze. The other sings invisible notes and weaves them in the center of spiky thorns. Because we were halved, the moon waned between us, the tides pulled us, boats lapping ever farther apart. On the crippled Greyhound, an old man shook his cane at smog, Taco Bell, and Reagan, that son of a bitch. He no longer had any use for his skin, so he bandaged it in Rainbow bread bags and let his eyes roll inward. Legs wrapped in tight strips of elastic, she emptied pans of yellow piss and coils of shit, flicked his arm for a good vein. When morning light blinked through the transom, she slid the needle in clean and sweet— sang to herself on the bus, a song we’d never share. Then she played the old game, searching men’s faces for familiar shadow planes, just as I searched faces for hers, played nurse without knowing why. | 52 Strapped down to a gurney, I’m in no position to argue when they stab into my spine and half of me drifts away—like a boat cut in two— unmoored, only to dock later, gutted and swept clean of the mass that had stopped dividing—had spun out of orbit. One man between two women stands on a platform, one at each end. From far off a train shrills. Each wears a hat of feathers from different birds, both endangered species. One looks down at the tracks, the other looks up into clouds of migrating moths. Their perfumes seep out and mingle in a storm...