Two Aunts

By Thomas James

When I feel the old hunger coming on,

I think of my two great-aunts,

A farmer’s daughters,

Speaking into the dusk in North Dakota.

I imagine the dark baron

Riding out of their mouths,

Thick-skinned and girded

Against disaster, swathed

In cuirass and chainmail and a curse.

My hunger was theirs

Too long ago. It swims in my blood,

Groping for a foothold.

It is the dark I thrust my tongue against,

The wine and the delicate symphony

That makes my head tick so exquisitely

Tonight. My ladies,

My dusky girls, I see you

With your bustles puffed up like life preservers,

Your needlepoint rose garden,

Your George Eliot coiffures,

Your flounces gathered like an 1890s valentine.

You both took heroin.

Your father never noticed.

You sprinkled it in your oatmeal,

Embroidered doilies with it,

Ate it like a last supper

At midnight. I know what you meant.

There was always the hunger,

The death of small things

Somewhere in your body,

The children that would never

Take place in either of you.

You were a garden of lost letters.

A lust inhabited your veins.

My addicts,

The village spoke of you.

Under your parasols, two rose windows,

The world swam with color.

Riding the monotonous hills at daybreak,

You escaped the indecisions

Your blood has handed down

To me. You rode your father’s spotted horses

As if they might have ferried you

Over an edge, a dark mouth in the distance.

I see you ride the black hills of my mind,

Sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk,

Galloping

In your laced-up flesh, completely unaware

Of something I inherited,

The doubt,

The fear,

The needle point of speech,

The hunger you passed down that I

Possess.

Copyright Credit: Thomas James, "Two Aunts" from Letters to a Stranger. Copyright © 2008 by Thomas James. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc..

Source: Letters to a Stranger (Graywolf Press, 2008)