Stepsister / Index of What We Found (Stepsister Reprise)
Two poems by Grace Roodenrys
Stepsister
That love, god it wanted nothing from us
the way rain wants nothing from
objects it touches with rain.
Remember how we listened down
to the small economies? Remember
we skimmed the pond for algae, moving
our sieves through the algae-thick pond?
Awkward, that’s what we were. Our faces
unlike each other and big on the water.
The spring it went blind the dog followed
us everywhere, it lingered quiet
in the shallows of the shallow pond.
It moved us, remember? How we heard
sometimes what it heard: its own porous life
opening, or the tadpoles stirring, blind also
Index of What We Found (Stepsister Reprise)
Shade inside shade
Three bite marks (between us)
Camellias (fallen) among the camellias
Complex formations of mould
in the compost
Our own adolescent breasts
Laundry (the neighbour’s)
Underwear (lace) presumed your mother’s
Honeyeaters (living)
Honeyeater (dead)
Honeyeater pulled up by the dog
where we’d buried it
A strand of my hair
Several empty cicadas
Your dog once
standing by the lavender
hearing us
Photo of my parents (their intimacy
troubled us) dated 1996
The dog again (dead)
by the lavender (redolent)
My father, putting on his right leg