When I see her come through the orchard toward my house,
I begin composing answers to the words
with which she’ll challenge me, her vision
precise and focused, as if every letter
were drawn beforehand. She stops, stoops toward a flower
she doesn’t pick, and the word I’m left is “sister”
as if she were coming to visit a younger sister
after a long absence, as if this stranger’s house
were where she’d watched my awkward gestures flower
to eloquence, as if I had measured her words
from a wider world each time a letter
arrived, message inhabited by a vision.
But I was the only messenger of my vision.
My father died. There was no brother or sister
but the orphan’s clan of branching letters
I taught myself. I moved from house to house
with a dented trunk, a few books, many words,
an acid fruit preceding its own flower.
Am I named for a traitor or for a flower?
Blood and fire have cindered and stained my vision;
I cursed their politics; they praise my words.
What answer can I give my older sister
when I open the door, welcome her into my house,
and she hands me the incriminating letter
while I imagine opening a letter
after scouring the sink, dusting a loaf with flour,
that tells me my house no longer is my house.
Beyond the window and my field of vision
my son is shouting something to his sister—
and it’s hard, all at once, to make out their words.
But in my yellow kitchen these are only words
I can’t pronounce correctly, in the letters
of my sister’s language, language that is sister
to mine. I watched her flame and flower
as boys threw stones—spliced shots on television,
and felt the leaning walls of my bright house.
In that threatened house, at a loss for words
my letter would be subject to revision,
flow or gutter, never reach my sister.