For my sister

You will understand from the beginning the difference

Between us in the volume and the depth of the voice

Had not happened yet 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 guns but the endless bickering over roles,

The three of you, hands on hips, always smiling

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

But as with boys, the large having the small, so never

Was I husband or father but myself, the little brother,

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

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

In some shadow-cloven interlude deep in the afternoon,

Giddy with gossip and dressed in the ancient clothes.

And probably you would know, with you gone, the hill

I would run 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 come 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 new house was built,

The open 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 rest of the dirty words.

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

Down there, with everyone imagining the children

Will get it straight from the cows, so it gets to be

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

But the boys stood with the girls, and one of them

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

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

And it happened that late one afternoon a bald man

I had seen in town came running out the front door

With blood clotted on his face and his shirt on fire,

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

As we sat together on the screen porch shelling beans

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

For from the beginning we had been taught that part

Of the difference is nurture, and another part silence,

So as our bodies grew strange, there were no words

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

Had burned and I thought you would want to know.

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

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Mar 1996
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