My brother never knew I had it, or for how long,
or that I have it still, dull red, brick thick
and heavy, on the bottom shelf. It’s slightly
slanted, anchors old notebooks, has been
moved house to house, even stood on
when I’ve needed extra inches. Like a term paper,
it’s indexed—letters, numbers, Roman Numerals,
down and down through all the rings of outline hell.
To breathe it is to know each dusty year.
What do I think of when I pull it like a drawer
from its cold place? Gateways and marble stairs,
stone building, square classrooms, the nuns,
of course. How they hovered overhead,
hands buried in the folds of black habits,
their tunics held together with pins, their scapulars
yoked and heavy. How the fields outside
went on and on and widened, and in the distance,
how the trees disappeared.
There is a lake up north that narrows at its middle
like an hourglass. From its central bridge,
where marshland filters its two basins, north to south,
you see the past, you see the future. One summer,
my brother and I saw nuns there—all that darkening
fabric in stiff wind—crossing the road—like giant
crows—they looked both terrifying and
hilarious. We never thought to ask why
they were there, where they were headed.
Now I go on as if this world were the same
world, looking up words, looking up
the rules for words, his book—the ocean
bottom, the furthest planet. It’s a block
of gold, the universe it holds, the home and
home-base of it—my brother hunched
over his papers, over a narrowing, circle
of light. Something inside me crashing again
and again into what that light makes of him.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 6.
Luci Huhn is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, whose poems have appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, SWWIM, Leon Literary Review, Rattle, and South Florida Poetry Review, among others. Her chapbook, The Years That Come After, was published by Breakwater Press. She lives and writes in Southwest Michigan
See all items about Luci Huhn
