Kurt Neumann

          Brothers and Sisters

          (After Adrienne Rich)

          Tonight, I have no one to sit up with me
          and talk about how we must live.
          Like most nights, there is no one
          to match words with, no one to share
          the syllables of fire in the fireplace,
          the snowy silences between phrases,
          the questions the moon asks
          before it hides in the curtains.

          And there is no one asleep in the next room.
          Only I sleep in the next room,
          but I as someone else, the I of a different age,
          a different life, a different brother and son.
          And the women in my dreams
          are other women:  not my wife,
          not my mother or any of my sisters.
          They have the heads and breasts
          of that other life that sleeps with me
          in the next room.

          And no one asleep in the next room
          has not dreamed of these women,
          women with the bodies of birds of prey,
          the birds of fear and poverty,
          and the voices of fire.
          They, too, are the birds of another life,
          coming and going in the difficult trees
          of another's dream.  And they, too,
          are here tonight and mortify my sleep
          with their silence.