twenty-nine.

Even with the windows closed
a breeze twists
blue stone windchimes,
crookedly screwed into the ceiling,
their wooden ring askew.
They catch on each other, clicking together
and reminding of that day, rain
threatening, the familiar dusty
air of the shop we visited
each August, buying candy
and birchbark dolls and
copper beads, comic books
and lead sinkers. The gravel
snapped under the tires the year my sister
turned sixteen, that last thread
of childhood. We bought ice cream
cones, blueberry and pecan,
and sat in the
grass trying to swallow
faster than the heat. Our
licenses crackled in pockets and
we'd rarely talked before, always
just that side of too far apart,
too much friction
in one tiny room. It was
the last summer I came home
to sleep in that house,
the rooms grown too tight for
all of us, soon to shrink smaller still.
I was in love with violence, the
stories of losses and redemption.
With words. With music.
With secrets and girls in red
lipstick and fishnet stockings,
with my childhood sweetheart,
with the desire to own everything
and admit nothing.
She was in love with a boy
who played the trombone.
We agreed on being somewhat adept
at ignoring the discontinuities.
We didn't buy windchimes or matching hats,
didn't take them home
in some parody
of eternal bloodline affection, but
years later, together
again in the same place,
she chose a set
in green for her son, hung them in the
window of a rented house in a
state I drive through on my way from
where I live
to the place I'd like to call home.
They hang there
still, and I wonder if, sometimes,
they chime in the stillness.