"Louisa Thinks, But Does Not Say"
Thanksgiving. Why do we come here,
and balk at the raucous orchestrations
of our brother? We walk his castle,
gawk at cars in miniature, dragees
on the cake tiers of showcase shelves.
He has stuck them everywhere, among
console stereos, sleek glimpses of futures
known only to him.
When you catch my eye, Jackie,
from across his kitchen, catch me asking
some cousin’s child “what are you
looking for,” quietly you echo
my own words to me. “What are you
looking for,” with that need-to-know
mouth. And when you call me
out, with that quotidian phrase, I come
down from comfort like a flapjack, flipped
in a long-dead prospector’s mixed-up pan.
I have thought of it often, Jackie, how
you were pyrite, thrown back by our mother,
allowed only your name. You look steady,
facing me with your question. Where has
all of it gone, Jackie, where have you put it,
the break of the board and the stardust
of splinters, saying Jackie Jackie Jackie
and the cluck of Mother’s swallows
mocking you from the couch, and the click
of cockroaches, wing-scuttle down pajamas
in the stricken black cellar no one visited
you in? What have you done with the prick
of our father, with the prick of our brother
staking claims even now? Strike a pose, he
might say. Jackie, Jackie, that’s the way. Did
you stash our family secret like a tick-tock
in a closet, or chuck it down a San Francisco
street, did you carry it to Nebraska,
no one saw you for years, did it follow you here,
does it beckon us both to this kitchen, this
locus, this tower?
If I were looking for anything,
Jackie, shaking that pan, I would sift through
these decades since we all gave up talking,
find the flake of long silence that keeps our brother
in this corner, chalking us up for suckers. He can see
what we are. We have been fools, Jackie, with a fool’s
golden silence, and that’s why he cocks a loaded
grin and offers—year after year—his casual thanksgiving
© 2007 Laura Polley
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