.jpg)
Sport 39: 2011
Twins
Twins
Look at the way my head
tilts to one side. My fists
are bunched in front of me.
You are there too, look.
You didn’t need to bunch hands
for balance, like I did. You knew
all about the left-foot-right-arm thing
she’d shown us.
Do you remember how she’d say
‘never trust a man who walks
like this’, and she’d march around,
left-arm and left-foot?
She would laugh and stomp
in puddles with us too. Big boots
full of big feet, us her miniatures,
up to her waist, by then.
She’d stop and crouch down,
make movies of us and take snaps,
as if every day was too good to be true.
Or just something new.
Sometimes Poppa would come.
He’d watch us, smoke his pipe
and smile, say grown-up stuff to her.
And she would listen and nod,
page 303
say something back, wave at the smoke
before it got to us, and show him pictures—
all those moments he’d missed,
just before he arrived.
We’d all gather around and look at us,
frozen in our mud-puddling:
there we were, on the screen,
doing that thing together.
We didn’t think then about time,
about now and about after. We thought
that if we missed something, we could
go through the pictures again. Later.