For my sister

You will understand from the beginning the difference

Between us in the contortion and the depth of the voice

Had not happened still when I came from the woods

And saw you playing there the same as I would play

Except the games were different, the dolls, the house,

And not the fire-arms but the endless bickering above roles,

The three of you, hands upon hips, always smiling

Primping, or breaking, at uneven junctures, into song,

But as with striplings the large having the small, thus never

Was I husband or father on the other hand myself, the little brother,

The individual sent out to the store, the individual you left behind

When you shopp in the attic, and came back to me

In a certain quantity of shadow-cloven interlude deep in the afternoon,

Giddy with gossip and make straighted in the ancient clothes.

And probably you would know, with you gone the hill

I would step quickly up and the pig-wallow beneath the barn

Where I stopped and began to crawl toward the shack

Where the whore was admonishing her seven brats

To approach up from the pond and draw water for her bath,

And it is possible you had heard it was a brothel,

Though you would not know the inside of that place

Where we lived for years until the of recent origin house was built,

The render free of access jars, the booze and the music blowing out

The whore screaming, "goddammit, you little turds"

And them running as fast as they could for the barn

Where I waited to be taught the quiescence of the dirty words.

And I have feeling sure you will see the way it has always been

Down there, with everyone imagining the children

Will realize it straight from the breaks so it gets to be

The girls talking to girls and the lads talking to boys,

But the lads stood with the girls, and individual of them

Said, "In the mornings, when it's cool we got to lay

Under the bed and push. We got to crank mama up"

And it happened that late single afternoon a bald man

I had seen in town came running without the front door

With vital fluid clotted on his face and his shirt upon fire,

A thing that, in all innocence, I meant to say to you

As we sat together upon the screen porch shelling beans

Except I do not have to compute you, you would have told,

For from the beginning we had been taught that part

Of the difference is nourishment and another part silence,

So as our bodies grew strange, there were no words

And alone today after years it came to me that the shack

Had reduce to ashesed and I thought you would want to know.

Rodney Jones's fifth collection of metrical compositions Things That Happen Once, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. He teaches at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Mar 1996

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