Ryan G. Van Cleave
Harmony: After Wislawa Szymborska’s “In Praise of My Sister”
My brother doesn’t write poems,
and though a professional musician, he refuses
to create lyrics. Words are crafty little bastards,
he once said, whining about his now-ex-girlfriend
as we wheeled towards Wisconsin in his Mustang
convertible, our mouths full of stars, the headlights
scything the night before us. On clear evenings,
gorged with the dark of pure sky, I wonder if he could
quarantine those words that mean most to him: sleep,
hamburger, tomorrow, I’m sorry. Perhaps one day
he’ll realize that he is a master of oral prose, that he
is a nation peopled with voices he has not taught himself
to hear. Poetry is an abstract noun to him, a garbage truck
that always empties on someone else’s lawn. That’s okay.
My brother thinks he doesn’t write poems and for now,
I’ll let him go on believing that. Today, I’ll just watch him
through the slab-glass door of a sonnet gone out of control
and let him, like a fugitive moon ticking across a summer sky.
Page(s) 162
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