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Of Brothers and Sisters
by Janet Krauss
I hear them in the room underneath.
I hear them, the carpenters,
he whistling while he works,
she laughing with mirthful ease.
In between the drillings, the fastenings
of the joists, the hammering of the nails,
they talk about casseroles, bee stings
and wayward friends. And I think
about the Wordsworths, Dorothy and
William, picking apples, shooing away
gnats over a stilled pond
and comforting Coleridge over tea.
I think of them working together:
she giving to William her visions
of the daffodils leaping like dancers
favored by the lake wind
and the broken boned leech gatherer,
his heavy, dark coat over his bent back.
"I wrote The Leech Gatherer for him
which he had begun the night before...."
And so the carpenter’s sister planes
and carries the boards up the stairs.
He secures the planks across the beams
stretching over precarious air. "Perfect,"
he whispers to her when he finishes.
And I think of my brother and me.
"Survivors," he named us:
we struggle to keep the answer
to who we are, who we called
ourselves to be, worthy of words,
perfect as the carpenter’s boards
that cover the meaningless space.
Published in "Common Ground".