request and a poem

[theprohibition.livejournal.com]

 poems about twins or siblings parting ways?

in return: "Do You Love Me?" by Robert Wrigley

She's twelve and she's asking the dog,
who does, but who speaks
in tongues, whose feints and gyrations
are themselves parts of speech.

They're on the back porch
and I don't really mean to be taking this in
but once I've heard I can't stop listening. Again
and again she asks, and the good dog

sits and wiggles, leaps and licks.
Imagine never asking. Imagine why:
so sure you wouldn't dare, or couldn't care
less. I wonder if the dog's guileless brown eyes

can lie, if the perfect canine lack of abstractions
might not be a bit like the picture books
she "read" as a child, before her parents' lips
shaped the daily miracle of speech

and kisses, and the words were not lead
and weighed only air, and did not mean
so meanly. "Do you love me?" she says
and says, until the dog, sensing perhaps

its own awful speechlessness, tries to bolt,
but she holds it by the collar and will not
let go, until, having come closer,
I hear the rest of it. I hear it all.

She's got the dog's furry jowls in her hands,
she's speaking precisely
into its laid back, quivering ears:
"Say it," she hisses, "Say it to me."

Comments

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Twins
Bob Hicok


She has a dream and she has the same dream.

She says moon and she says moon and both put their she-phones
to their chests.

She says in my dream I slept between your mattress and box spring
and she nods and she hears her nod.

She says I was in the blue dress before you put it on
and after you put it on, like a soft paper flower she says
and she says yes, like a soft paper flower.

She nestles the phone in her crotch and she nestles the phone
in her crotch and the pubic hairs say it was warm in the dream.

She puts her face against the cool window and they play
where's my face and she guesses against the cool window.

She says I hung up the phone an hour ago and she says
I hung up the phone last year and still we go on talking
she says and she says we go on talking even while I am dead
and even while I am coming back to life.

She is two places at once and she is two places at once
which is four places at once.

She has to go back to sleep now and she has to go back to sleep now.

She says are you asleep now and she says yes and are you asleep now
and she says yes and they go on talking about being asleep now.

She has a dream and she has the same dream and in the dream
she is dreaming what she dreams and she is dreaming what she dreams.

Then it rains.

[midwstrrnr.livejournal.com]

Oh man I love this poem except for that last line, but maybe it will grow on me.

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Supple Cord
Naomi Shihab Nye

My brother, in his small white bed,
held one end.
I tugged the other
to signal I was still awake.
We could have spoken,
could have sung
to one another,
we were in the same room
for five years,
but the soft cord
with its little frayed ends
connected us
in the dark,
gave comfort
even if we had been bickering
all day.
When he fell asleep first
and his end of the cord
dropped to the floor,
I missed him terribly,
though I could hear his even breath
and we had such long and separate lives
ahead.

[moireach.livejournal.com]

What Work Is
Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

[midwstrrnr.livejournal.com]

Damn! I love Philip Levine too! You have fantastic taste.

[moireach.livejournal.com]

:)

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Another relevant Levine poem:

You Can Have It
by Philip Levine

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors' appointments, bonds
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.

[moireach.livejournal.com]

So fucking good.

[moireach.livejournal.com]

On the Way to the Farm I Think of My Sister
by Joyce Sutphen

There's a different highway now
coming across different fields
west of the old double lane.

Once you're on it, you don't have to stop
for anything, except congestion in July
when everyone else is heading

North. You'd like it: driving at 80 mph
with the music forty years past when
you left the planet ... but no more

gasoline at 29 cents a gallon! No more
Beatles (John and George—both dead),
no more cows in the stanchions, no more hay
in the barn. Otherwise, everything is
pretty much the way you remember it.

[cecilydolce.livejournal.com]

wowowowowow

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up the Task
by Jon Pineda

A basket of apples brown in our kitchen,
their warm scent is the scent of ripening,

and my sister, entering the room quietly,
takes a seat at the table, takes up the task

of peeling slowly away the blemished skins,
even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully.

She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh.
For this, I am grateful. I explain, this elegy

would love to save everything. She smiles at me,
and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills,

domed with thin slices she brushes into
the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove.

What can I do? I ask finally. Nothing,
she says, let me finish this one thing alone.

[foreignthinks.livejournal.com]

These were posted in this community not long ago, but really stuck: http://community.livejournal.com/greatpoets/3110954.html