The Sign of the Self

The following poem is an excerpt from BLOCKS WORLD, out this month with Great Place Books.

An orange landscape is a blasted meaning
parched. Optimistic. Hardscrabble. My sister. My dear.

How do you stand every day

and admit to the world

that the self isn’t something you make but rather a ravaged inheritance:

an orange, rocky place that you try to love your whole life

*

How can one sister be happy?

How can one wound

suture itself over time becoming a story

like a scar I often forget? How can another remain

blatant and open, refusing to bleed, refusing to die, refusing to return a fucking phone call

*

What is it like to be my sister?

I barely know what it is like to be yours, though I have been yours every day of your life

*

Sister, why have you been left with

nowhere to live but the land of the self? Soft apocalypse of arid terrain

Nothing grows except rocks pushing up like a jaw closing in on a leg.

Is this the implacable place that you go
when you fall off the face of the earth

disappearing for days and once for two years
into the heat-wavered distance of absence?

In the land of the self the air rattles with wind

through a vertical raft of empties—subtle plunk of plastic, dull marimba of glass.

I’ve never thought to stop here.

I don’t see how you can stay.

How can you survive this deathless crap?

What is your kingdom to you?

*

I don’t see how the river
has the patience to work
its way through the fiery plateau.

The river starts at the top and carves down through time
creates the cliff face 
creates the shore.

The river does not dominate the orange landscape only changes it.

I want to ask you how

do you rule you in strength

and though you won’t answer you do.

What is the river getting at?

What is beneath

this armor and rock? Your forthright face and voice that speaks
beneath its words don’t push me away again

*

I am trying to be more brave these days. I am trying to be more like you. I don’t really know how to do that.

Your sign is the sign of the self, which is where my life tells me it’s headed whether or not I am ready.

What can you do with what you have

been given and forced to undo?

I wish you would tell me how to survive

the desert of priority. How to remain

intact as a glass

with a tornado of flame inside

*

What is it like to live in this world?

What was it like for you when we were kids?

I live in this world and I was a kid but never the way you were.

What was it like that day at the beach?

None of us could really swim, though some of us were strong enough

to pull through the water to the floating dock. You were too small to follow.

I don’t understand why you do what you do
nor why you keep doing it.

I’ll never understand
why you swam out that day, though I can imagine
an answer. Imagination’s not my problem.

My problem is understanding the world
when a self says now and follows through

*

It’s not my knot to pick apart, but I haven’t helped you much.

There’s a lot I don’t know, but I need these facts
to stand still for a moment. I can feel them wanting
to self-arrange inside the appeasing
trompe l’oeil of memory
so here I’ll write it out:
                                         I watched you dog-paddle toward the dock and I watched you start to flail. You went under while I watched, and I realized no one was coming to help. When I reached you, you tried to climb my body as though my body were a tree in the ground instead of a sister in the water. I think it worked for a second. I think you were able to stand on my shoulders and breathe.

*

I forgot all this for many years.

“I don’t mean to retraumatize you,” our sibling says to me, noticing how inward I turn.

“That wasn’t traumatic,” I say, honestly and wrong.

*

I wish you would call
when you say you are going to.

I wish you would call when you have no intention of calling
at a time I can answer the phone.

I wish you would call because I have questions
but they’re not the questions you’re avoiding
I say, honestly and wrong.

I know I pushed you away. At the time I needed to
save us both. I wonder if you would call if I didn’t
have any questions. I wonder if I could
walk far enough to meet you
in the arid valley with its river and the answer it carves