TOM THE TWIN
by Sally Cole Mooney
Go back to Sally's
Memoirs Page
A
POEM SALLY WROTE FOR ME
There was this time, this small
window of time, When I'd wake up early, before the
others, And him, and the dog, and come down to
find you there alone. Alone, I, one of five, and a
twin at that. And you'd say, "Tommy, come over
here!" You'd be leafing through a magazine,
through Arizona Highways: We'd look together at
this world that couldn't be for real. Those colors
couldn't be, that sky, those peaks. But you said,
yes, yes they were, and we were going there. We'd
climb those buttes, we'd have a swimming pool And
orange trees in our yard. We looked together, you
and I, in the gray Kentucky dawn.
And damned if you didn't deliver! I couldn't
believe my luck. Eight years old, turned loose in
a place like that, Cottonwoods and ditches, desert
air and non-stop sun. We'd be gone all day and no
one blinked an eye In 1959, before the faces on
milk cartons, Richard Speck, Charles Manson. . .
God, before the Beatles! We were wild because you
let us be. You wanted us to see it all. We, all of
us.
I don't think I ever had you to myself again,
After those mornings and, before that, the morning
I was born first, Twenty minutes ahead of him. I
like to think you held me Wet on your belly for
that small window of time, Before the next one
came. Beamed and hung on me your father's name.
Thomas Hascall Cole for twenty minutes, your only
son.
And then came Steve and sixteen short months
later, Jeff, With the girls there already And the
dogs and, Lord, the friends, All piled into the
station wagon, ripe for adventure. We'd drive into
the desert on the weekends for breakfast, You
pumping up that old, green Coleman stove. We'd
drive for hours after work on Friday Just to wake
up in a sleeping bag on a Mexican beach. And when
we'd pile back into the car on Sunday, you'd stand
there Looking, for a few last minutes, looking,
out at the sea, Holding it against the hard times
ahead.
And hard they were, after you headed north Out
of the desert, into the pines, to Flagstaff. You
said "Everyone should build their own house once
in their lives."
And you did, board by board Hammered and
leveled and poured cement. You tilted that house
so it caught the mountain in its mouth Like some
glossy magazine spread, that big wedge of
stillness Framed just for the looking.
And that's where it happened, like some cosmic
joke. Five children. And struck there in the
ovaries. But you didn't flinch. You said, "You
take what you get dealt"--yours all deuces--but
you held them Dry-eyed, held them, knowing your
time was up.
That's when we met alone again. You told me,
"Tom, I was driving on the old cinder road, when I
turned the corner And there they were, the aspens,
white bark, yellow leaves Against the sky. Tom,"
you said, "I burst into tears."
And, don't you know, I had them. For the first
time in my life had Just the words there in my
mouth all ready to go. And damned if there weren't
five of them too, simple and heart-true, Those
words that I, Tom, the twin, didn't say, didn't
say to you About the aspens: "I'll be looking for
you." No. I held them, when you might have had
them--my gift-- Might have ridden them right out
of here In that last gray dawn with nothing left
to see.
And now I have to hold them, hold them back in
the throat Where when you swallow they don't go
down, Hold them, all these years remaining,
looking At what you made me see: This big,
spinning world, this big, Beautiful, goddamn
beautiful world.