She's A Place

 

My Sister

My sister is a place where

Sorrel horses walk single file through tall

Lodgepole stands,

Where sunlight severs down and dulls and shatters

Before it hits the ground,

Where the grass is tall saw grass, wavy

Like the grass in the Sargasso Sea,

Where eels spawn and the new eels

Migrate to the continents of their parents'

Origin, inexplicably...

We don't know how they do that.

Life is nothing if not obvious.

My sister is a place where

I left the gas cap on top of the '82 Land Cruiser.

It's got to be around here somewhere,

But I can't find it,

And if it's around here

It's walled by snowy mountains where

The wildflowers (lupines, columbines, penstemon)

Bloom a month later than here,

And are smaller,

And all around are aspen trees turning yellow

As their yellow leaves turn in the wind,

Where things that fall and roll away

Cannot be found under the fragrant sage,

And as I look around, I'm thinking

Of the time I chained and churned and shoveled

That rig through five miles of thigh-deep snow,

Occasionally jacking it up in back

And tipping it off forward to keep going

Just to get to a phone to call a girl,

And the time I drove with my daughter

Across Nebraska and Iowa in 105 degrees,

Blocks of ice to cool us pooling on the floor.

My sister is a place where

Rivers swell in spring and falter in the fall.

My sister is a place

Where no time passes.

We cannot live there.

-James Galvin