These get progressively weirder as I write these prose poems.
This last one-- the last of the prose points I want to read is
a poem called--
it's called "Sisters."
And the title is dedicated to my own sister.
And the title is a half serious but--
no, is a serious half-invitation--
that's the way to put it-- to take
the poem as having certain kinds of political content.
Anybody who calls a poem "Sisters"
is going to raise certain obvious associations
in the mind of an audience.
The idea behind the poem-- and I think it's related
to the political, to the possibility of thinking about
such political issues--
and beginning thinking about them
by going back to your own life and thinking about them
in completely on ideological terms
and starting back from there to see what it feels like--
is the idea that when you have siblings,
what you remember of them is not some kind of unified being,
but you remember a series of sisters.
There was a cute two-year-old sister, the 2 and 1/2 and so
on.
It's like a movie and you watch them frame by frame.
That's one of the ideas behind the poem.
Anyway this is called "Sisters."
"When the coach told us a tie was like kissing your sister,
I couldn't believe he was that corny.
I opened the gray metal door with louvers
and took off my basketball shoes, my prowess,
my two pairs of sweat socks, the green practice
jersey with my number in gray, my shorts, my jock.
I put on my street clothes, my family, my dog and walked home.
The coach was an idiot but I too believed
a sister was a girl you couldn't sleep with.
I don't know what my sister did after school.
When I got home, she was always in her room.
An incubator, an electrical dictatorship.
There was a record player, a hairdryer that puffed around
her head like the top of a souffle, a dressing table
with lights around the mirror.
She pulsed in her room like an electric larva.
We'd always had rooms of our own.
We envied each other bitterly.
Have you ever noticed how you keep reimagining the past,
making it mean more?
Well, my sister did have a lot of appliances
but that's only one picture of her.
I'd like to call her up right now,
to hell with the phone bill, and find out
what she was really like.
But she can't remember a large parts of it either.
We talked about it once and discovered
we had different parents.
Oh, the same couple conceived us and lived with us,
but our memories of them overlapped a few times only,
like eclipses.
Have you ever noticed how the more usefully
you make the past explain your life, the more unreal it is?
I've had so many sisters and all of them gone.
In that way, we are all movies of each other.
The lights are lowered, there is a white box on the screen.
It is like an abandoned refrigerator and my sister
and I go in.
It is like a phone booth for calls to the dead and my sister
and I go in.
The film begins.
It stars my dead sisters and my dead selves.
The Earth is being invaded by the future,
only the dead can save it.
We decide to take over the bodies of the living.
The acting is awful, the plot is melodramatic,
the end is ambiguous.
But we like the film because we like watching each other.
And we can imagine how much fun we must have
had playing those silly roles.
The lights come on.
It's late.
I huddled into my coat.
It will be dark and cold outside.
I think of my sisters frame by frame,
like apostolic succession.
I remember slouching out into the winter
night after basketball practice between lives.
I go towards the future, strung by sisters.
I push ahead of me a cloud of cold breath.
A bellwether."