Larks by Hannah VanderHart
I am a girl, Antigone.
I have a sister. We love
Each other terribly.
Robyn Schiff
You would think that the two Athenians’ bodies
Were poised on wings, and poised on wings they were,
Philomela flying off to the woods
As a nightingale, and Procne as a swallow
Rising up to the eaves.
Ovid, trans. Stanley Lombardo
i.
My sister tells me she is a bird.
She does not say she is a bird
but I know it to be true. She wheels
and dives. Her pinions swoop.
Somewhere, moss and toothwort
carpet the wood floor. Somewhere:
generations of birds are born.
ii.
The nest of eggs. The shed
in the woods. The foxy
gentleman and the lupines
around Jemimah.
Her feathered desire.
Into this story Beatrice
poured her sympathy
like tea in a china cup.
The hounds lick up
the broken eggs.
iii.
My sister tells me
and my memory
is clean, an empty stair
though she says
I walked up them,
opened the door.
That I called
my father
at work. What
is this? This
nothing
in my brain –
this blank day –
my life had stood
a loaded gun.
iv.
If you slammed a door
too hard
in my family’s house
a rifle would fall
from the top
of the wooden buffet—
a gun always seemed
to be falling.
It never went off.
v.
My other sister’s harm, I remember—
another bird in the rafters--
anger on my body like a fine
dust on Mars, in my lungs;
anger where the stairs
met hardwood hallway,
entryway rugs, the stairs still
carpeted, not yet creaking.
My pacifying mother.
My other, younger sister.
vi.
I want an otherworldly ex-
planation for unkindness which
is the milk of this world.
vii.
Anger is different than rage.
Rage: a hurricane that makes
the whole world wet.
Anger: directed at another
person like the sharpness
of a scalpel; acknowledging
a person the way a wing
acknowledges a buffet of air:
by flying into it. The way wing
makes power of a draft—rides it.
viii.
The confusion is one of having
nothing. The confusion is
I have two sisters, whom I love.
They have hands and tongues.
But we three sisters have different
memories, speckled and striped.
Facets of a stone. Points on a shell.
ix.
I don’t mean to go on long,
to go on with longing—
like a pilgrim with a distance still
to go, and a burden on their back—
but at one time all three of us were
flannelled and nightgowned,
on the couch together. The moon
lit. The cedars filling the night.
Happy. Laughing. Last century.
x.
Sometimes something has to be
a wing, a joint and tendon: a
wooden spoon, a dowel rod, wax—
as many feathers as you can pluck
with your own two hands from a bird
that only two minutes ago ran through
the clover on its yellow, spurred feet.
xi.
For each thing given to you,
make one thing up. For every name
told, recite a new name. For each
received story with a man making
a woman, build your own person
out of feathers and flowers.
Daedalus, Pygmalion: let them go.
xii.
Arachne asks you to come and sit.
Never mind her many legs. Move over.
Gossamer silk, the spider’s throwing
line, has the filament strength of alloyed
steel. Arachne will teach you nothing.
You teach her how to spin a tale so long
she can climb down the end and jump.
xiii.
It will always matter that you
are a woman. Or that someone
saw you as one (or not one) in the past,
sees you as one (or not one) in the present,
future. That bird is slang for a woman,
as well as any “man made object”
(aircraft, rocket, satellite) that resembles
a bird by flying, being aloft.
That “the bird” is an obscene gesture;
your finger practically raises itself.
xiv.
*
*
*
*
My sisters tell me I am a bird
You can find more of their work at: instagram.com/rainbowteeth
