This is also a lighter level.
It's called the Siamese twins.
And when I was--
I don't know how I must have been about 11 or 12.
Just at a point of sexual awakening.
And I was asked by the druggist across the street
to deliver some drugs to two old ladies he said.
I didn't know who they were.
And they would give me $0.50.
So I brought over the drugs.
And an old lady answered the door stout.
And while she was reaching in her pocketbook
for my Eisenhower 50 cent piece, she was being tugged away.
And being 11 years old, or whatever
you're allowed to stare and see what's going on.
Looked around.
There was another little old lady.
A little less stout connected to her by the hip.
They were as it turned out later the oldest living Siamese twins
in the country.
They were the Gibb sisters.
My mother told me about him.
She mentioned that when she had been a kid,
she saw them in the sideshow in Atlantic City.
And that they were very happy ladies.
And they were nice to me.
They gave me my $0.50 in a poem 30 years later, whatever.
The Siamese Twins.
Out the door, a hand, or arm, a slip,
a swift look tells which one.
Fat one, thin one, shadow and light.
They float from sunlight to shadow.
And the boy, the new boy is confused.
Which one?
Two nearly identical faces lean over and oak and table.
Thin one has a fugitive charm skittering off to the bathroom.
Fat one knits a scarf of winter blue and white.
Invited to sit or stand.
He sips a cup of tea.
Two faces reason from the steam.
They are two of them so much he loses count.
Both are breathless beholding the new shiny coin
from his coin collection and the frayed sneakers from his paper
route.
Their eyes penetrate and won't let go.
In the other world, his twin is doing a phantom dance,
a silver thing.
The poster on the wall above the fireplace
presents a circus time, a story time.
Two goddesses emerge as steam from a GreenLake
dotted with islands.
The original lovely things.
His wish, to come upon them naked on the beach.
Pine shadows mingle their pairs of breasts.
They tremble because they are surprised once more beheld.
They are his mother says.
The famous Gibbs sisters seen as a child in Atlantic City.
They were so pretty then.
They sat over tea and chatted.
He'll never remember what was said.
But pictured them trying to swim a lake.
Two naked identical ladies each angry at each other,
each swimming toward a different island on which was a shack
a catch of coins a miserable strip of beach.