by Li-Young Lee

[mery-bast.livejournal.com]

This Room and Everything in It

( spicy poem ahead- you've been warned )

Our Other Sister For Ellen

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn't shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who'd gone away.
What my motives were I can't recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she'd stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I'd just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Harrison, Jeffrey. Feeding the Fire. (Sarabande Books - 2001).

Sonnet: When I have fears

[vitreouswraith.livejournal.com]

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain
Before high piled books in charact'ry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy powre
Of unreflecting love -- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone and think,
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

-- John Keats, Sonnet: When I have fears (1818)