Telling

I'm sitting on a cold stone bench
in front of the squat library
huddling in on myself to escape
the late afternoon chill.
Next to me my brother sits quietly
with questions in his eyes,
question whose answers I struggle
to capture and tame into words.
They stampede around my head
like a heard of wild horses
avoiding my attempts to corral them
into complete sentences.
So I stutter and stumble over
my tongue that trips on my teeth.
My silence is filled with the white noise
of students wandering by in conversation,
their shoes scuffling over the stones
and kicking up brown crunchy leaves.

My words fall into place like shards
of a broken vase that is carefully
pieces back together by a loving hand.
The nervousness dies down as a momentum
takes over and I rush through the explanation
as if running towards a finish line downhill.
He looks at me, face clear, a hint of confused
amusement coloring his eyes and shrugs.
That's it, my big secret warrants no more than
a dash of bewilderment and a nonchalant
knitting of his dark eyebrows.
I watch him and no more reaction joins the first,
I suppose that my secret wasn't that dark
and in the end its ok to let it out rather than
allowing it to lurk inside my head, scratching,
reminding me that it's still there.
So I smile and let out a slow breath,
releasing that small secret into the air,
watching as it vaporizes like a cloud
and gently drifts up to the listening trees.

November 7, 2002