We’re talking on the phone, as we do now
several times each day, when my sister asks
if I’ve written a poem about her foot.
No, I say, it’s not the sort of subject
I would choose. She doesn’t know I specialize
in elegy, that she’d have to lose it first,
the way she lost a toe, a piece of bone,
an ounce of flesh, her own vision of the last
twenty-three years. She doesn’t hear me think
about the way she scrambled syllables
when she was small—tail nose for toenails—
or of the August she was two, parched by fever,
her body hollowed, when we played tea party,
sipping endless water from blue willow cups.
