Sisters

Did he ever say to you, "I wish I could go running?" And so you stopped. You stopped going running when you needed your strength most in order to take care of him -- it was the summer he had the transplant, and you were decorating the house, and his mother was staying w/ him -- didn't you need your strength more than ever ... more than ever ever? If I said, "I wish I could go sailing," as you say you wish I would say, that it would occur to me to say, instead of saying what I did say, wh. is that I cannot meditate sailing on such a day, you would bitterly retort -- go sailing then, knowing no stray or bull or carnivore would take me. No, it wouldn't matter whether I said I could just go sailing on the day my sister says we wouldn't even know each other anymore, except for the relationship of sister -- and what a marvelous thing truth is; no, truth is that you like hurting me because it frees you to go sailing. That you can go sailing & feel caressed by the lake on the day after you have sent your sister to a prickly bed … that you can take her men, lightly, away from her, that you can abnegate her, frees you. I did go out on the lake this summer & tried to meditate w/ the swoosh of the water & the sun, but w/o a boyfriend in that setting, the sea was not of me, the lake, the way it was in childhood, the way nature envelops divorced people ... they are friends, but men aren't interested in me anymore, and it isn't that I wasn't spiritual enough, as you say. … Do you believe that men deserve happiness for all the happiness they have created in themselves & for others? Some of us have given every evening of our lives to working spiritual programs and still -- maybe it is men wouldn't be enough for me, a stray who likes the flash of fake blond hair, like a bird that likes shiny objects. Maybe it is that love would be enough for me, the right one. So I wrote about love in a slightly different way than you. I've been thinking about finding women again, that maybe one of them would find me worth knowing & loving & that our good humor would return to us; are there lesbians w/ boats or do only strays, bulls, and carnivores have them? and that she might be interested in something besides the flicker flash of fake blond hair, my poetry inside of me, the depths of good whales.