The lilac wasn’t much of a sister,
though it was always sloughing off old clothes
and habits, the way I thought a sister might,
and I could spend afternoons sitting

on its one thick bough, make-believing, breathing
its perfumes. But Syringa vulgaris
is no name for a girl. And when it sagged across
the path, my mother hacked its foreparts with a saw.

Books were sisterly, but sometimes they only
threw my lack into relief. In “Goblin Market”
Laura would have died without her sister’s
love. Wasn’t that the whole point? And of course

I was Laura, seducible, gorging myself
on whatever. Just the names of the enchanted fruit—
damsons and bilberries, bright-fire-like barberries—
filled my mouth with drool. That other Laura,

in Little House on the Prairie, told her sister
everything she saw, after scarlet fever
left her sister blind. When Pa instructed her,
“Be Mary’s eyes,” my own eyes welled. A sister

would have understood why parts of me
were always swelling up or dampening, or both.
A sister would have seen in me what Charlotte
Brontë saw in Emily: my secret power

and fire, my warm and sudden, my altogether
unbending. But I had to be both of us, myself
and she, witnessing me. It was a sort of authorship,
nursing the girl my parents never made, trying to fall

in love with myself over and over
by inventing her. All winter the birds came to eat
at the long glass feeder. From the window we would
watch them, whispering their secret names.