Lovely Asunder: Poems

LOVELY

LOVELY My sister accuses me of leaving and staying gone. Her face has grown dim as she waits for a reason. Musk and winter darkness cling to the heavy curtains hanging from her windows, crowding out the deep green of camellia leaves, their thin tips scratching her window, and beyond them traffic blooming smoke in rain, thistle weed and wild grass growing in the busted body of the pavement, no longer a smooth gray bone the way it must have been when it was poured down a decade ago. I don’t know, is all I can say. I know fog stands in the hills of the park down the street. And on the other side of the park, a reservoir. And on the other side of the reservoir, an avenue of warm light and chatter, scones and fried pork, rain beading up on the surface of umbrellas, buses, airplanes breaking through stratus to blue sky. Above there are people nodding and smiling through compact windows, looking down at rain clouds, lightning, whole swaths of sky suddenly radiant  as pearls, as the meat of the apples we ate in the summers of our childhood. Translucents, they were called—tart and delicate, ripe with light— That was so long ago, sister. All forms, from a distance, are lovely and bind us. We’ve tried to evade the shapes others make of us—the sense of ourselves built on those shapes. I was not the only one to leave. Remember those boxes you kept beneath your bed, tied with pretty red ribbon? Remember the night you slipped out through the window, barefoot down the slant of the roof, dropped like dark fruit onto the streets alone, left me to find your untied boxes, each filled with the skeletons of birds?  ...