Sister

Sister

Sister

Supple as wisteria
her plait of hair across our beds –
my talisman at the age of five
against torch-eyed gods and ancestors
who leaked nocturnally
out of cupboards, keyholes,
the crevices of festering karmas.

Later
we drank deep draughts
of monsoon wind together,
locked eyes in mistrust,
littered our bedroom with books, fuzzy battle-lines,
quivering dominions of love and malice,
even as we ruptured time,
scooping world upon world
out of cavernous weekend afternoons
through the alchemy of mutual dream –
turquoise summers over ruined Mycenae,
the moon-watered stone of Egyptian temples,
and those times we set the zephyr whispering
under the black skies of Khorasan.

Clothes were never shared,
diaries zealously guarded,
but in the hour before the mind
carves out its own fiefdoms of memory
we dipped into the same dark estuaries
of lust, grief and silted longing.

Now in rooms
deodorised into neutrality,
we sniff covertly
for new secrets, new battles, new men,
always careful to evade
the sharp salinity of recollection,
anything that could plunge us back
to the roiling green swamp of our beginnings.

But tonight if I stood at my window
it would take very little, or so it would seem,
to swing myself across
to that blazing pageant of peonies
that is your Brooklyn back-garden,
careening across continents
on that long-vanished plait of hair,
sleek with moonshine,
fragrant with Atlantic breezes.