[Julie Bruck won the QSPELL Award in 1994 for her first book of poems The Woman Downstairs. The poems below come from her second book, The End of Travel]. -Ed.
It’s rare, slow as a creaking of oars,
and she is so frail and short of breath
on the street, the stairs - tiny, Lilliputian,
one wonders how they do it.
So, wakened by the shifting of their bed nudging
our shared wall as a boat rubs its pilings
I want it to continue, before her awful
hollow coughing fit begins. And when
they have to stop (always), until it passes, let
us praise that resumed rhythm, no more than a twitch
really, of our common floorboards. And how
he’s waited for her before pushing off
in their rusted vessel, bailing when they have to,
but moving out anyway, across the black water.
A boy kills himself at fifteen,
and it takes his sister most of a life
to emerge from those deep waters,
something always sucking her under:
She’d just begun to slip
out of that old, wet dress
when she wrote her brother an elegy,
offering him rest:
There is a raft in the center
of my chest, she wrote
before she or anyone else she knew
what flowered in her lung.
It’s a beautiful poem, we said,
It’s finished, and we turned
to other matters. Climb on,
she’d written. Make use of me.
THE END