I am a girl, Antigone. I have a sister. We love Each other terribly.
Robyn Schiff
You would think that the two Athenians’ bodies Were poised on wings, and poised on wings they were, Philomela flying off to the woods As a nightingale, and Procne as a swallow Rising up to the eaves
Ovid, trans. Stanley Lombardo
i.
My sister tells me she is a bird. She does not say she is a bird
but I know it to be true. She wheels and dives. Her pinions swoop.
Somewhere, moss and toothwort carpet the wood floor. Somewhere:
generations of birds are born.
ii.
The nest of eggs. The shed in the woods. The foxy
gentleman and the lupines around Jemimah.
Her feathered desire. Into this story Beatrice
poured her sympathy like tea in a china cup.
The hounds lick up the broken eggs.
iii.
My sister tells me and my memory
is clean, an empty stair though she says
I walked up them, opened the door.
That I called my father
at work. What is this? This
nothing in my brain –
this blank day – my life had stood
a loaded gun.
iv.
If you slammed a door too hard
in my family’s house a rifle would fall
from the top of the wooden buffet—
a gun always seemed to be falling.
It never went off.
v.
My other sister’s harm, I remember— another bird in the rafters—
anger on my body like a fine dust on Mars, in my lungs;
anger where the stairs met hardwood hallway,
entryway rugs, the stairs still carpeted, not yet creaking.
My pacifying mother. My other, younger sister.
vi.
I want an otherworldly ex- planation for unkindness which
is the milk of this world.
vii.
Anger is different than rage. Rage: a hurricane that makes
the whole world wet. Anger: directed at another
person like the sharpness of a scalpel; acknowledging
a person the way a wing acknowledges a buffet of air:
by flying into it. The way wing makes power of a draft—rides it.
viii.
The confusion is one of having nothing. The confusion is
I have two sisters, whom I love. They have hands and tongues.
But we three sisters have different memories, speckled and striped.
Facets of a stone. Points on a shell.
ix.
I don’t mean to go on long, to go on with longing—
like a pilgrim with a distance still to go, and a burden on their back—
but at one time all three of us were flannelled and nightgowned,
on the couch together. The moon lit. The cedars filling the night.
Happy. Laughing. Last century.
x.
Sometimes something has to be a wing, a joint and tendon: a
wooden spoon, a dowel rod, wax— as many feathers as you can pluck
with your own two hands from a bird that only two minutes ago ran through
the clover on its yellow, spurred feet.
xi.
For each thing given to you, make one thing up. For every name
told, recite a new name. For each received story with a man making
a woman, build your own person out of feathers and flowers.
Daedalus, Pygmalion: let them go.
xii.
Arachne asks you to come and sit. Never mind her many legs. Move over.
Gossamer silk, the spider’s throwing line, has the filament strength of alloyed
steel. Arachne will teach you nothing. You teach her how to spin a tale so long
she can climb down the end and jump.
xiii.
It will always matter that you are a woman. Or that someone
saw you as one (or not one) in the past, sees you as one (or not one) in the present,
future. That bird is slang for a woman, as well as any “man made object”
(aircraft, rocket, satellite) that resembles a bird by flying, being aloft.
That “the bird” is an obscene gesture; your finger practically raises itself.
The dashes and elisions and caesuras of trauma—from Ovid to Dickinson—create a particular kind of music: one marked by gaps and absences, aspiring to both song and silence. “Larks” engages this formal tradition, where the unsaid is integral to the fabric of what is said. The poetic line, nested in silence, is able to hold what we can no longer carry.
Carol Rumens chooses a poem from Heidi Williamson's collection, Return by Minor Road, in remembrance of the 1996 primary school shootings in Dunblane, Scotland. "Spared direct personal bereavement, unlike some of her friends, she explores various ways of making poems which acknowledge the difficult balance of what might be called distanced witness."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
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