piss, I see the ingot of his beard,

and think of my younger brother, his beauty,

coinage and voltage of his beard, his life

he is not using, like a violinist whose

hands have been crushed so he cannot play—

I who was there at the crushing of his hands

and helped to crush them.

Late Speech with My Brother

I can see you now so vividly,

fine head tilted back,

bold Teutonic jaw stiff, the

bristle along it glistens and your blue

eyes glitter like glass. I have always

feared you would take your life, I have seen you

taking your life for thirty-five years,

taking it cell by cell. I can see you

throw away your body as easily

as you thrust your whole thumb that time

into the moving machinery, so

gracefully, as if you understood

the union of science and the human. I can see you

sending your body to hell as they sent us to

bed without supper, you’re as big as them now

and as proud, you would die before you would break and say

Please, don’t. Please, don’t

do their work for them,

don’t produce a stopped life like some

work of art, the bottle fallen

away from your open hand. It is not

too late, your life is ahead of you,

behind you is your thirty-five years of

death—I have seen a man of eighty

drop his parents’ hands and just walk the other way.

The Elder Sister

When I look at my elder sister now

I think how she had to go first, down through the

birth canal, to force her way

head-first through the tiny channel,

the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,

the tight walls scraping her skin.

Her face is still narrow from it, the long

hollow cheeks of a Crusader on a tomb,

and her inky eyes have the look of someone who has

been in prison a long time and

knows they can send her back. I look at her

body and think how her breasts were the first to

rise, slowly, like swans on a pond.

By the time mine came along, they were just

two more birds in the flock, and when the hair

rose on the white mound of her flesh, like

threads of water out of the ground, it was the

first time, but when mine came

they knew about it. I used to think

only in terms of her harshness, sitting and

pissing on me in bed, but now I

see I had her before me always

like a shield. I look at her wrinkles, her clenched

jaws, her frown-lines—I see they are

the dents on my shield, the blows that did not reach me.

She protected me, not as a mother

protects a child, with love, but as a

hostage protects the one who makes her

escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s

body held in front of me.