On My 35th Birthday

I let a hand lead me home for grace,
and were it not for grace I would have
stayed to see you pass the time.
But I am old in my young years,
and 35 seemed much too fine an age for me.
I left it for you to do, as for me, I had
to walk the soft lips of eternity
and could not stand the gravity of earth.
It hurt my feet. It pounded my ears. It made me heavy.
I lay my weight with you, my sister,
with our brother, our mother, and our father.
I lay my weight with you, and
sit for a spell under the river birch
to rest and watch as life blossoms into night.
I write in my book of you and press my dreams
onto your spirit like flower fragments
forgotten in an old dictionary somewhere.
And you will be bright like red stain paper.
And you will be tough like a pig skin bag.
And you will write in your book of me
and follow grace home when the hills call.
And I will catch you there, on the flip side.

Surfacing

I can't write this story. At least not right now, not this minute. No, probably not any minute. Every single time I start to think I'll write the first line, I feel that sensation of everything inside of me pushing out. I felt it that morning. 

It was definitely that morning.

“Come in here.” 

I don't know if it was a whisper. It was Daddy's voice and it could have been a whisper. It must have been because Meghan and Jennifer and Michele kept sleeping. Poor Michele. She remembers everything and had to sleep on the top bunk alone, separate, always. She was never allowed to play with the big girls. She always had to sit, and watch, and remember every wrong thing we'd ever done.

“Come in here.”

Granseur is sitting up in bed and wiping his eyes. Momma is sitting on something in front of the window. No, she's sitting on the edge of Granseur's bed. I don't know where I am. I mean then I didn't know where I was and I still don't know where I am. I think I'm standing, next to the bed. And Daddy's standing, in front of the window. 

This isn't real. This isn't real. 

I already know and this isn't real. I always already know and I hate knowing.

I knew that Nanny wouldn't make it through that last week of life, and I already knew that Granddaddy wouldn't make it long without her. I knew that Daddy was gone before he left. And I knew that something was very wrong this morning.

“What is it?” I say, annoyed, disguising the fear inside of me with a tone of anger. Pressure builds in my ears, everything inside of me, pushing out. I can't believe Daddy can speak. Can Daddy speak?

“Your brother's been in an accident.” Is he dead? Is he dead? Is he dead?

“Is he going to be okay?” I felt four. I felt three. I felt small. My voice comes out in a whimper. A true whimper. It's raspy and frightened even in my throat. It pauses at the roof of my mouth before everything inside of me finally pushes it out.

I have no idea what he said. I have no idea what my father said to us.

Momma hugs her arms close to her. Her fingers are just beginning to look old, like Nanny's. The ring hangs there loosely. Nanny's ring. One gold band so thin it will eventually break, but Momma wears it loosely there on the one finger whose knuckle hasn't yet swelled too large to fit a ring over it. She's holding herself tight and stroking her arms with those skinny fingers and I have no idea what Daddy said.

“No.” That's it. That's what whatever he said meant, anyway. “No, he didn't make it.”

Granseur is everywhere in my mind. Jonathan is dead and I turn to Granseur, whose lips, heavy with sleep, dangle in shock. His understanding eyes stare straight forward, out the window and into nothing. We are not the perfect three any more. We are two siblings left of a trinity that was meant to make it all the way through life with one another to rely on. It will be only us for the rest of our days. The middle brother has become the eldest, so what now, am I? I fall into his lap and cry seventeen tears for every year I had with our brother before realizing we're all crying, and I cannot have that.

“You're it, then. It's us.” I say to Granseur. And I wiped my eyes and did not cry again for a month.

“I watched you when Mabel and Aaron passed, and I watch you now, and I'm just so proud of how strong you are,” Uncle Eldon whispers in my ear. His breath hints of liquor. He smells like Thanksgiving morning, and I wanted to cry then but Daddy had tears in his eyes so I stopped mine. I did not even cry when the bagpipes started playing. There was no body to see. We burned him up.

“You just look so like him,” Heather said to me at the visitation. She has loved him since she was born. I will play a song for her and the words will be different from when I sang them before. We sit outside by the fire pit because I cannot stand in a row in the house and receive the guests who want to cry on my shoulder. We had traffic control for my brother. The cars made the alfalfa in the field lie down in such a way that it looked like dogs had been playing there. Everywhere and all over the tall grass had been laid down by people who wanted to tell us how much he meant to them. Everywhere and all over, it had been laid down.

“Meghan, wake up.” My confidante in crime lies there sound asleep. She hates this part. She would have me never tell this story.

“Meghan. I need you to wake up.” I do not sound like my mother. I do not sound like my father. I sound like drowning. I cannot begin to compare a parent telling a child they've lost a sibling to telling your best friend that the man she meant to marry has died. They are different, and the same, and I am drowning in the possibility of words. 

“No. What is it?” she mumbles. Hot breath. My face is cold but I had no idea until her hot breath hits my face. She wakes me up.

“Meghan, wake up,” I say. “Jennifer, wake up.” I grab the bunk post and shake it. I shake it with gentle urgency. “Michele,” I call out. Strong. “I need you guys to wake up.” Their sleepy faces greet me, and I wonder how Daddy felt, only moments ago, when all it took was a whisper to raise me from this bed. I wish now more than ever that telepathy were a gift of mine. I'd place the words in their minds, gently, and never have to say them aloud. I'd never have to tell Jennifer and Michele that their favorite boy cousin drove a white Cadillac straight off a curve into a tree. I'd never have to tell Meghan that we wouldn't be sisters, because Jonathan has died. 

“Is breakfast ready?” asks Michele. 

There is no breakfast. We wouldn't be having country ham or eggs. We would be having the Thanksgiving dinners of too many families. I ate chips and pound cake for three days. Meghan and I hungrily gobbled the Nance's Boston Butte for a solid seven minutes. When Meghan handed me Jonathan's guitar I threw it all back up. It looked like confetti, and I couldn't smell anything at all besides fire pit. I played Say It Ain't So by Weezer and the words were different than when I had sung them before. Each lyric caught in my throat, burning worse than all of the smoke of the world inhaled at once. 

The fire was lit before I went outside that morning. Daddy had stood beside it long enough to already smell like smoke when he told me that my brother had died. 

“Is there a fire?” I ask Jimmy, on my way down the stairs. One of my father's oldest friends knows the history of everything. He knows how we fight, and how we pretend we never fight. He knows the cars we buy and the schools we went to. He knows my favorite color is purple. His face is round, and kind. 

“There is.” He smiles. We wont say any more. 

“We almost got him there,” my Daddy tells me. The next spring we sit under the umbrella on the porch and Daddy tells me how he feels like we almost got him there.

“Almost got him where, Daddy?” I ask. I always thought Jonathan and I were where we were. It hadn't occurred to me that there even was a “there” to get to.

“Almost got him there. Almost got him better,” Daddy says. He is referring to legs broken during drunken falls, and the plague of reason that strangled Jonathan each day of his quasi adult life. He is referring to the final semesters that would have completed Jonathan's eight year attempt at a bachelor's degree. He is referring to a relationship between father and son that would not mend with ease, to a relationship that simply would not mend. Almost is a comfort word. It means failed without saying failure. But to my recollection, no one failed. 

 

“I think he was there, Daddy,” I tell him, and hold his hand. “He was there, and I guess he is there.” 

 

I have been wearing Jonathan's glasses. I know his astigmatism is worse than mine. I know he was near-sighted, where I see mostly far. But I want to see like him. So I wear his glasses. And I wear his sweaters with scarves and my AP English teacher tells me I look Hobo Chic.

“Don't you mean Boho Chic, Mrs. McKissock?” I ask her.

“No, Cynthia, Hobo Chic,” she says. She calls me Cynthia and she is the only teacher I do not correct because when she says my name it feels soft and circles into my ears and calms my mind. Her voice is melodic, like Jonathan's, and gentle as a breeze pushing hot air out of the way. It soothes me. She reads Shakespeare aloud and makes us memorize the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English dialect. When I go home I stand on top of Jonathan's trunk in the room that will not change for six years and belt it loud as bagpipes. I shout it for the story he never finished, for the degree that does not hang on his wall. I shout it for the memory of a shared love of words. I shout it for him. I spend hours a day trying to hack into his computer. I go through the drawers of his desk and find that Granseur has already been there and removed anything that would upset our parents. I sit in front of his bureau and stare at myself in the mirror, trying to find the parts of my face that look, like Heather said, just so like him.

Sometimes I think I am becoming him.

Granseur wrote a poem the morning our brother died. My parents found it and thought it was the last thing Jonathan wrote and worried over rumors that it was suicide. I was ashamed that they couldn't tell it wasn't his style. It didn't mean it wasn't good poetry. It just wasn't Jonathan's. I try to write like him, but it doesn't fit. It looks the same sometimes but the placement of the words is all wrong. Everything is all wrong. 

 

It's all wrong. It's all wrong, wrong, wrong.

Everything inside of me begins pushing out. I'm at Appalachain. I walk the same hills he walked. I stand in front of Walker Hall when it's snowing and take a picture, smoking a cigarette. I fuck up. I drop out. I move home. I don't break any legs during drunken falls, but I think about it. I wait for things to get worse. I become the black sheep piper and this house is falling rocks, and I laugh my way out of it. I get married. I get divorced. I read The Atlantic and pretend like I care. I cry, sometimes, when no one is looking.

And then, I lose my brothers glasses. I've moved too many times to find the silver ring he gave me. His lighthouse lighter runs out of fluid and I leave it in a box marked “trinketry: to remember”. I stop trying to write like him, and the writing gets better, easier. I remember like wet paper dried on a surface remembers the shape of the thing it dried on. I do not forget his face. I do not forget “tickle toes” or riding his back around Mawmaw's living room floor. I do not forget the piercing sound of tenor drones invading my ears when I am trying, desperately, to finish a paper. I do not forget the roughness of the stone wall leading us to the games, and I do not forget his warm legs during cold rain. I become a simile of the man that died. I act like Jonathan. I read like Jonathan. I look like Jonathan. But I am not Jonathan. You can look at me and see him, but only because I am the surface his wet paper dried on. 

 

No, I cannot tell this story. Not now, and perhaps not ever. But maybe, I can begin to explain why we never died.

McIver

The black sheep piper
is laughing in and out of the house.
He understands that door is unstable.
This house is falling rocks and
his breath is spinning in the dust.
Happiness is a mountain
Merry-Go-Round of misconception,
stuck in indifference.

Sausageplum Fairy

I remember thinking how dance would make me feel beautiful. By beautiful, of course, I mean thin. Parents who had hoped to enlighten and broaden horizons by taking me to musical theatre and ballets had instead accidentally mislead and slimmed my image of beauty. Oh damned ever are the good a parent tries to do. Young minds and old alike are kind to misinterpret. While mommy and daddy thought I would find the music entrancing, I of course could see nothing but toothpick legs in all of their elongated glory. How the Sugar Plum Fairy did glide across the stage on those appendices, and with such ease! They may not have been human legs at all; it must have been magic! Smeared with delicate pink tights, I could not then define the grace it must have taken to demand such leaps and bounds from such legs. The prima ballerina, is prima beautiful, because she is prima thin. I thought, looking down at my pudgy little girl thighs, that I could never muster such grace as she.

Ah, but no, I had the encouragement of two such parents who dared me to attempt anything I found interest in at all. Write a poem! Taste the beets! Put your finger in the center of the cake; even if you don't pull out a plum, you'll have cake on your finger, and that, too, was an experience my parents allowed me to have. So, I wanted to take dance lessons, and not just any dance, but ballet! I would be the Sugar Plum Fairy, and I would have branches for legs that would sweep me across the stage and toss me into the air—and I would be beautiful, and thin. I would dance in tights, and, my God, was that leotard a lycra spandex poly blend? Oh yes, in all of it's metallic purple glory, and a mock corset across the front, laced with county fair cotton candy pink ribbon. I thought it made me look beautiful. My brother thought it made me look fat, but what did he know? Ballerinas are thin and beautiful and I was a ballerina scheduled to dance the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies during Act II of the Albemarle Academy of Dance Recital. I would be on stage with a slew of other young hopeful ballerinas, all beautiful and thin, in front of an eager audience just dying to behold the utter skill of our performance. And all of us in those tights, the very tights I saw gracing the stage in the big city would smear our legs that delicate pink. 

Ah those tights, so appropriately named! Oh, and me in my pair, with that cruel elastic band meeting my body across the middle in such an unflattering way. My brother said they made me look like two sausage links kinked together. I thought he might be right. “Don't listen to your brother, stockings treat everyone that way. What does he know anyway?” my momma said to me, and that was enough. Then, I found if I pulled the tights all the way up, just below where little mounds were starting to grow, then I would look like only one sausage. This way, the tights held all my little girl goop smooth and in place. I thought they made me look beautiful, and thin. I had ribbons in my hair. I had tender little ballet slippers. I had red lips and rosy pink cheeks and I felt beautiful! I remember momma telling me I didn't need it, the lipstick and rouge, when I told her I wanted her to paint my face. “You're so pretty, baby girl, you don't need to cover up your beautiful face with that stuff!” I can still hear her saying it. Maybe she was right, “but all the other girls would be wearing it,” I told her in my most plaintiff pleading voice. That plastic mud smell of lipstick still makes me think of the look of shock on her face when she had finished and gave me a once-over. “What! Is it beautiful!? Do I look like the Sugar Plum Fairy!?” I asked, excitedly. “Yes, baby girl, you look just like the Sugar Plum Fairy.” Had she said it with a tone of exasperation? It didn't matter, I looked like the Sugar Plum Fairy and I felt beautiful! 

On the way to the Agri-Civic center for my recital, my tights kept sliding down from their place beneath my mole hills and I found it was very difficult to pull them up from outside of my lycra spandex poly blend leotard with the mock corset front. I was becoming exasperated. My brother was in the backseat making fun of me as I tried reaching in from the top, from the bottom, from the outside, all desperate attempts to pull them back up. When we got there, momma told me not to worry about it. “You look beautiful, baby girl, like a prima ballerina!” Still, I went to the bathroom and pulled them all the way back up, stretching them up over my little girl goop piles, up into my armpits, and holding my arms down to my sides with such force that that endlessly squeezing elastic band surely had no chance of escaping back to it's ill positioned place across my belly. I was feeling less beautiful, and less thin as I walked backstage.

Waiting there with the other girls, I began to notice that of all of the girls in my group, I was the biggest, not in length, but in girth. And not just the biggest, I was the ONLY pudgy little girl in my group. They were all much thinner, certainly no chance for sausage kink bellies there amongst my peers. Should my tights dislodge from the grasp of my armpits and slide down, sure enough, I'd be the only sausage kink on stage. I began to panic. My eyes frantically scanned the entire left wing looking for any sign of my chubby kin. It was no use. I was surrounded by beautiful, thin little prima ballerinas and I wanted to cry. I wanted to burst into tears and cry five thousand each for the tights, for the slippers, for the ribbons in my hair, for the lipstick and the rouge and toothpick legs that I would never have. I wanted to run back and tell my momma that she was wrong and it was mean to tease me so and tell me I'm so beautiful and I'm a Sugar Plum Fairy when I obviously was not. I wasn't beautiful and I wasn't thin and there was nothing I could do about it but go on stage and let everyone laugh at the Sausage Plum Fairy. I remember our exit on to the stage, and how my heart must've wanted so badly out of my chest in that moment when I had to decide between lifting my arms and letting those damn tights free or ruining the lines of my dance. I lifted. The tights fell. I became the two links of sausage, kinked in the middle. 

But no one laughed. No one seemed to notice at all. I caught one of the other girl's wide eyes and realized she must be scared, just like me. I smiled and she smiled back, big, and then we danced. Grand jeté and plié, we danced and bowed and made our exit. I remember giggling on stage with the other girls at the end of the recital, waiting for our parents to come and find us. The girl I had smiled at said she liked my lipstick. “It's my momma's,” I said. “It's beautiful!” And with the elastic band still choking me across the middle, I did not feel thin, but I did feel beautiful.

Audrey

You are the kind of joy that never ceases.
Even in between the lines and baby creases,
you are splendid, and beautiful.
I break into a thousand tiny pieces
and Audrey, you may have them all.

Your tiny hands with five long fingers each,
into my heart, the depths of me do reach
and wring me to tears.
I stop for thinking that I'd have something to teach
you about the world, and my fears.

And your little spirit, so eager and new
and hungry for the milk of life, for morning dew,
is magic of the most sacred kind.
I stand in awe of the love that created you;
perfect union, Audrey, in you enshrined.

Growing Pains

Are we too old, then,
for believing in fairies still?
I remember when
you thought one tapped the window sill,

how you shook with fear.
Said I, the oldest and most wise,
“fairies wont come near,
so sleep sweet cousin, rest your eyes.”

We wanted wings, too,
so we sang their chants in the woods
and brought fairy food:
donuts, cake, a slew of baked goods.

Remember the home
we made out of rocks, roots, and moss?
Those things are not gone,
they remain in a pile of loss

of our innocence.
Now we stand trapped by adult thought;
This state, transience,
worse than having no fairies caught.

an embankment at the edge of the woods

You will not find me beneath the stair
for I have given up my playing there
in favor of vines that toussle my hair.

I am not by my brother's side pinned
for I must, too, from his play rescind
else miss the freedom of the blowing wind.

You find me absent from folded quilts
for I found the strength of ancient silts
where the earth a wall of clay has built.

I play no more in Daddy's colognes
for I, for quiet, the house disown
and prefer now the company of stones.

I am not there, high in the hay loft
for I the pleasure seek something soft
and hay could never compare to moss.

In the chicken coop find not you me
for I the haven of bending trees
have sought and dance there with the fairy king.

Return I not, though desperate your call
for I, by the woods, have been enthralled
and in private joy, have forgotten all.