USA

wehrli@erols.com

Why, in 1967,
My Sister's Life Scared Me

She was a KDKA radio talk show groupie queen,
my sister with the dirty hair, it seemed
she'd stayed inside the house for years,
though she was only twelve and shy
inside her gray wool coat, its deep pockets
full of dried spaghetti strands she'd hold
like cigarettes between her fingers,
or else lined with crimson barberry leaves
snatched off bushes under the gargoyles
of St. Helen's.
                        It was the year she spat
far and proud across the sidewalk
on the way home from school, "like a man,"
she'd say, and I'd walk behind her, watching
the hard-glint stare she gave
when I called out for her to wait.

                                                    That fall,
the borough cop, Roger Baker, so rotund
he could flex his belly's muscles
and steer his cruiser, handless,
through the narrow streets, I'd seen
him do it, climbed our front steps
one  afternoon, the day Lizzie F., beaten-up
and worse, was found behind a row of trash cans
lining Brinton Alley, her pale skin and heavy thighs
bruised purple as the clustered grapes,
stake-tied, half a block away, beneath
the faded eyes of Bonacci's blue Madonna.

Lizzie with her slow-start eyes and full-blown breasts,
named my sister and another girl as two
who'd seen her the day before, talking
to the man who later did this to her
and what exactly he did, I couldn't quite yet figure--
But the sky above the slanted back porch,
from where I stood, hung a steel-blue sheet
as I listened to what that man had brought inside
our house, a ferocious, high-pitched kind of quiet;
my sister, lying on the couch, blanket-wrapped,
her swollen eyes, far-off staring--and when I went in
and sat beside her, there was nothing she would say;
days passed before I heard again the muffled strains
of radio seep out the crack of light
beneath her bedroom door.

                                            She'd switched to KQV, sang
as if she'd known them all her life, each pop tune's
lyrics; even the air inside her room,
when she let me in, smelled different, as if
there was less for me to breathe, and what was there
was sweetened by the scent of gel she'd combed
through her hair before wrapping it in rollers.
And when she slept, three pillows cushioning
her head, some nights, awake, though still asleep,
I'd cross the hall between our rooms
and step outside the night light's dim circumference,
to kneel against her bed and watch how she lay
face-up and taut, never flinching, her slight arms
crossed to cradle her body's thinness, nights
the hills outside rubbed their blackened fingers
up and down her bedroom windows, the orange halos
of the neighbors' porch lights
left burning until morning.

Departures

When my sister drops me from her hand
the furthest door falls open
and I am sliding into that room
with the slanted floor where night gathers
in the corners.  It used to be the roofs outside
the window of that room trembled beneath us,
at noon, the buses shivered by, the birds
chanced a stop on spring, glanced
through the clouded glass at the empty
cupboards, then moved on.

Now, at night, when I can't sleep,
I climb the floor toward all those half-open
cartons hovering over me.  If I lift the flaps
and turn my ear, I can hear the whisper of slippers
in the downstairs hall, I can see the faint flow
of her red robe, like the softest flare
in the front room window, in that moment before
she opens the door, walks out across the street.

Poem Sent Backwards in Time
to Trish, My Sister

Trish, earth and sky flatten into the stained drip painting
made once at the stand in Kennywood Park, centrifugal force
spraying a liquid field across paper; looking down,
the only focus I remember stayed inside the paper's center,
a dark unwavering not unlike the stilled unflinching
your brown eyes made that fall on Kinney's Hill, the afternoon
we hiked our mountain, then, descending, wound fresh paths
through ocher grass and broken branches, startled by a man
whose arms were clad in yellow fabric, his eyes shining, click
and rattle, behind glass hub-cap round and thick as bottle,
the teeth inside his grinning mouth like broken pebbles
worn down by water.

                                   And how you, leading us through
clumps of vine,
turned back, tilting your head toward mine, eggshell pale,
the skin that cupped your eyes, that wrapped your hands,
your fingers.  How many times he grabbed your arms and ankles
as I stood behind my forest of branches, brush, and brambles,
becomes the blurred scattered-paint motion revolving around
what I remember, the fixed stillness of your eyes, the steady,
quiet way you pled with me; below us, up and down,
a red brick street, the worn frame houses sheltering porches
whose far corners were being washed gray, right then,
in evening's darkness.

Remember the clockmaker, his home stuck inside the dead-end street
between two houses, one brick, one frame, and the way slag fell
closer to his front door, all the time the walls yellowed
and paper tore into shapes only his daughter could read.
But fires were coming up toward the floorboards; the tunnels
collapsing beneath the street, and the first time she saw his
foot step down into the heated room beneath the house, the table
shaking and pendulums swinging in every room, the clockmaker's
daughter decoded her memory of signposts strewn on the hillsides,
pictures of arched timbers leaning into each other; she remembered
how trees at the edge of the yard, these weeks, lit red far
into evening and how, when the morning sun cut shadows
into the window's grit, she'd see, from the outside looking in,
her father as an accumulation of fragments, a pattern both blurred
and concise, the shape his back made, hunched over the workbench,
jagged as the earth splitting below his feet, the hammering beneath
his hands conjuring the evaporation of motion into clouds of steam.

© Copyright, 2000, Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.