By Lyn Lifshin

 

in the house overlooking

rainbent pines,

in the life others

would envy she loses her

self in fragments. How

could we have changed so

she asks over the

phone. How could I not

still be eleven in front

of the old Plymouth

on Main street,

Mother Younger there

than I am now. Beginnings.

What might go, pressed

flat as a daisy from

someone she tries to

remember like a deaf

man remembers an

opera he heard

eleven years ago.

My sister, fragile, as

in demand as those flowers

has found her days

losing color, turning thin,

breakable as those nearly

transparent brittle leaves.

Nothing bends

like the pines. Her

days are a shelf of

blown glass buds

a heart beat could shatter. Come

she says We can laugh

at what seemed so

serious then. Maybe from

what happened in the

apartment when the

roof fell in or

at Nanny’s as Herbert

was dying we can

know something about

the stories we

haven’t begun yet.