Audrey

Summer
twilight
and a nice
turn of the phrase from the whippoorwill,
cricket jazz from unknowable
dives and
one fine note from the owl in his oak.
Somewhere in the dark a bullfrog
belches
like a Carolina senator after breakfast.

Secret scent of evening--
rich weather of honeysuckle, spiders'
blood on red clay and scorpions
panting hard in dark earth.

Hot nights in the South.
Audrey loved them.

Her inner life rippled
toward us,
vibrations in clear air.
Her color,
warm marble
or the white grip of a hot
pistol,
turned heads and
dropped each gold-tooth
love-boy dead in his tracks.

Audrey smiled at the camera
and the Kodak adored her face.
Look at the picture now.
It's faded
as if a million
summers
stared into it at once.

Her crazy long hair
came all undone in that tree house.
Strawberry
blonde of the family
whose smile,
sweet center of June,
gentled our days and
double-dared us after dark.
Always
first
into the ocean and
suddenly invisible there.
Half girl.
Half dolphin.
Sweet smell -- the salt
laughter from her lips.
Audrey dived deep
where we never would go.

She said --

AWFUL MEMORIES
FALL TO THE OCEAN'S FLOOR.

Some hide and wait,
those pearl-handle
heirlooms or
scorpions holding their
breath in the earth.
Audrey ripped apart
false
healing that forgetting is,
found her monster
who lived in the family house
who came at night into a little girl's
room and touched with horrible
sting her deepest self,
made her know adult
secrets.
Made her keep them.

A second skin
pressed close around her,
spirit armor against atrocities.
Kirlian
snapshots in peculiar
albums,
strange
lockets of memory to wear.
faint smell from a favourite book.

Audrey,
sad at our clumsy
ways of playing
house, our slipshod
rules of loving said --

HEARTS HAVE MANY
ROOMS. IT'S THEIR NATURE.

I said to her
'memory's not
so generous, fading as it does like
watercolour in the sun.'
She smiled --

MEMORY'S FINEST ROOMS NEED CONSTANT REPAIR.

Audrey,
if this is a letter to you
who would never grow old,
come back to us whom you left so carelessly,
paint with your thinnest
brush a perfect
father
so you'll never need to get high,
sketch with pen and ink that garden your
sister always wanted.
Maybe your daughter's the start of Sheryl's
garden.

In the
house
where we lived,
your sister and I,
sunlight
came in like a blessing on the head and
we knew without a word being said
that the dark was only feathers
and moonlight a friendly
weather.

You whom we could not save
saved us over and over again.
Times of bravery in the dark.

Though
your sister and I
live
apart now,
night between us like a dark bandage,
in each of our houses
small as they are

you, our Audrey, have two rooms.