Taking Her In
For Fiona

You're taking her in, your mottled little sister,
splayed on the lap of the capable nurse
with relatives flanking her fever. Outside
late November is leaf-fall and frost,
the ground blotchy, matching her face
for raddled texture, the close of a season.

Tilted aslant to the window, you're playing
a game with your eyes, you're trying to catch
the car becalmed, the world in progress
backwards, the other way, back home.
You're not there yet, not nearly there
when the nurse looks up.  She's gone. I'm so sorry.

The car stops. Your breath stops. Everything stops.
Such stillness in that car, you'd swear it's there
for good, you feel the stalled wheels sinking anchors.
Your uncle gets out, seeking a telephone,
seeking advice, and you see the adults
are no more certain than you what comes now.

Uphill, a postman cycles past - the one
who gave her peppermints, who'll take a cord
and guide her through that fine slot into earth?
He glides on the skyline, his cobweb wheels
tumbling against his progress, and is gone.
You stare as though he might spool by again.

It's colder, darker, and now there's a wind.
You're glad of the hood of the car, a shield
to the cryptically gesturing skeleton trees.
You wish you could drag that steel lid lower,
wear it like a carapace, a metal skin,
haul your limbs and head and heart right in.

Finally, your uncle returns: the door
squeals on its ailing hinge. There's a pause;
nobody speaks; you hear his loops of breath
as you, he, all of you, reel yourselves in.
At last he turns to the seats behind.
We'll go back, he says. But of course you can't.

On Our Hands
For Patrick

This evening, as you touch my arm, again
I see the strange alikeness of our hands:
your hand is my hand, swelled into a man's;
two sketches, on two scales, of one terrain.
And now you take a pencil, tilt the light,
and borrowing my writing paper, lined
in feint-rule blue, you move that hand to find
the contours of my face across the white.
If I could only touch your hand and take
your gentle skill in my like hand, I'd draw
my mirror vision of the portraiture
that only love and skill conjoined can make -
but even in this clumsy hand of mine
your face is framed in love across these lines.