TOM THE TWIN
by Sally Cole Mooney
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MOM
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.