‘On Our Walk to Le Celle’ & Other Poems

On Our Walk to Le Celle

 

Because we knew nothing

about breaking a bird’s neck,

when we saw the fist-sized swift

lugging its injured body chest-first

along the sunned cobblestone,

we couldn’t end its suffering.

 

Anyone who believed in God might

ask why, on a hike to the monastery

of St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint

of animals, we would see this bird

dragging its crumpled legs and tail

down a narrow mountain road.

 

What should we do? my sister asked,

both of us thinking we had no right

to take what little time it had left,

even if the rest of its cut-short life

would be pain. So we kept walking,

something we both knew how to do,

 

something we shared with the swift—

the will to move forward after

the wind’s knocked out of you.

The rest of the day, touring the hermitage

where St. Francis tormented himself

by starving and sleeping on a hard bench,

 

we said nothing to each other

about the bird we’d seen, its determined

black eyes staring at the sky as it hauled

the broken back half of its body,

its deflated wings like pitiful dishrags

wiping the ground clean.

 

 

Afterparty

 

Hey twin, here’s the plan: after your last breath or mine, we’ll find

ourselves outside of time. We must know where to meet, and when:

 

Let’s say half-past ten [so you can sleep in], at a desert oasis

where sun-drenched disciples worship their tans, or in the eaves

 

of a cold cathedral in France. Our hair braided into crowns,

we’ll wave like queens, gloved hands stirring circles by our cheeks.

 

Let’s meet where night becomes day, that pink plug of light at 5 am,

or better yet, in the space between Springsteen’s fingers and guitar.

 

I’ll see you on the serif in eternity’s lowercase r.

I’ll see you in Cortona once the monks have gone to sleep,

 

on the stone path leading up the mountain to Le Celle,

stars scattered like hundreds of breadcrumbs on a dark plate, or

 

in the bus station café in Camucia, where the old cook

reached across the lunch counter to cradle our chins.

 

To get there, remember his name: Blanco, and his kind brown eyes,

his skinny arms, the cut on his nose. Let’s meet before chemo,

 

before baldness and blankets and ginger ale through a straw.

We’ll meet where water sparkles, the pond by the county hospital

 

where we were cut from our mother one minute apart, back when

the only operating room was the one in which we were born.

 

In fact, let’s return to before we began, that lawless land,

wherever toddlers think they go when they close their eyes.

 

Let’s meet in the chasm between the imagined and the absolute.

Whoever gets there first must claim the corner booth.

 

 

When The Doctor Says Cancer

 

the patient hears Not Cancer.

Pink light floods her heart.

Denial must be some kind of miracle, then,

the brain inflating like a life raft,

tricking the body into staying afloat

the river of words from the doctor.

 

Two hundred miles above the doctor

saying Cancer, an astronaut sleeps

on the International Space Station,

zipped tight in a bag so she won’t float away,

knees to her chest, weightless as a fetus.

In wombs, twins trace each other’s faces.

 

The patient looks at her face in the mirror

over the doctor’s shoulder and sees her twin

before understanding it is a mirror not a window.

In the beginning, she and her sister were the same

cell, a single cell holding one hundred years

of nicknames, nightmares, first kisses, cancer.

 

In the beginning, one cell split and began replicating

in a race to the finish line: birth, the beginning of ending.

Before knowing them apart,

 the patient’s mother

 carried below her heart

 two more hearts beating.

 

The doctor says No cure, just chemo.

So too, in yards across America,

golden retrievers chase unthrown tennis balls,

the cruel beauty of blind faith.

The patient must tell her twin she will survive.

Cancer sticks in her throat like a cracker.

 

The patient must tell her twin they will survive.

One bad year, she will say. She dials, thinking

about the astronaut’s body floating in a bag,

floating in a ship, floating in space.

She dials, pitying the astronaut coming home—

the burden of gravity after that kind of sleep.

 

 

Twin Speak

 

Dream speak, mirror speak, unspoken speak.

The babble of babies. Bugs Bunny words.

 

The nonsense and fears of childhood. Worlds

we created together, mundane, magical, complex.

 

Cat-and-mouse speak. Make-me-laugh speak.

Quiet-so-the-witch-won’t-hear-us speak.

 

Four decades of conversations without words—

just eyebrows, a shoulder roll, a chin tilt.

 

A nod, a look, a code. An internal knowledge,

ignited at conception. Never Pig Latin. Never Gibberish.

 

Language painted in watercolor, stick-drawn in mud,

lettered in yellow icing on a shared birthday cake.

 

Language that traverses years, mountain ranges,

marriages. A language that is waterproof,

 

frost-resistant, sturdy as snow boots. Steady

as a ladder held by the person you trust most.

 

Every time I fall in love she says, You don’t care

about anyone but yourself. She means: Pay attention to me.

 

I’m the first one you loved. Every time I hurt her

I say I’m sorry, meaning, I always come back to you.

 

Coffee talk. Real talk. What-if-he-doesn’t-love-me talk.

Best self, worst self, manicured, glittered, polished talk.

 

Lip gloss, platinum blonde, matching leather jacket talk.

Drawers full of nicknames, colorful as socks.

 

Nicknames for the men: the German,

the Romanian, the Egyptian one-night-stand.

 

Words that sound English but mean other things.

Our word for milk left in the bowl after cereal.

 

Our word for the artificial leg in Papa’s closet.

The word for our father’s belt. A language felt.

 

Words that catch in the throat like a cough.

Words sacred as notes passed in church,

 

sacred as the year she spent in a hot pink camp chair

beside my chemo recliner. She knew what I wanted,

 

spoke my wishes to nurses while I listened

to my voice coming from her mouth.

 

She washed my sweaty pajamas and sheets, lifted spoons

of applesauce to my lips when I was too weak to eat.

 

I’m sorry, was all I could say. Don’t be, she said,

meaning, Don’t you dare leave me here alone.