Vanishing Twin

A poem. "So I became a divided child."

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So I became a divided child
hungering in the Cimmerian womb
for your unborn form.
You, aborting the warm
chamber, the amniotic gloom,
left me there alone, exiled.

The two of us would swim and swarm
inside deep unreachable water,
laughing without lungs,
tasting without tongues,
secret siblings, son and daughter—
but I was fated to be born.

I am the heathen, lost among
the chaparral and waste places
like one whom God reviled.
You, too dear for the wild
desert, light with heaven’s graces,
took hold of Jacob’s ladder’s rung.

You ascended fast. Your doom
was saddled to the swifter horse
and winged like Pegasus.
But mine is Erebus,
consigned to the lower course,
a sick man in a waiting room.

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