On my forty-ninth birthday, my dad calls me a fledgling,

Jane Zwart

and I set a miniature nest on a glove. I’m trying
to be vulnerable. I’m trying to trust the cupped hand 
of God. 

                   So here it is: before I was a fledgling, 
I was a ward, and my ward was my brother—
the small one, the one whose organs didn’t glow 
on oncologists’ screens. Yes, I’m trying trust,

but also I’m trying to doubt my memory 
because, in every kitchen it can conjure,
Luke and I are daguerreotypes, slight 
and slightly blurred, always standing 
with a lightswitch at our backs, just inside the door;

because in my version of the past, impossible things:
trains pull up to porches every time
we set suitcases down.

. . .

The truth is I have no idea who saw us off 
when our parents loaned us to the unfamiliar mercies 
of other families. I don’t remember when I thought:
Now we’re like the Boxcar Children.
Now we’re the Pevensies’ kin. But when
is beside the point.

                                       The point is 
I knew that when your guardians go—
sick or shipwrecked or called to a front too dangerous
for you to follow—you learn to scrimp. 
That’s how you stay a penny ahead 
of defaulting on your welcome. 

. . .

Of course I knew, even then, that our parents 
didn't want to leave us, that they were desperate,

and of course I knew that I couldn’t rest
and that I’d have to carry Luke everywhere, unable to rest him 
on the hips I didn’t have. When your guardians go, 
you trim all the fat from yearning. You court tolerance, 
not love. And if I wasn't a natural, I still had it in me: 
ingratiating feats and bland moods.

. . .

Before I was a fledging, I was furious, and I was cruel 
to my brother, the one that would grow up, 

because he would grow up 
and because what a small us we made. 

. . .

On my forty-ninth birthday, my dad calls me a fledgling, 
and I go looking for the boy I could not let out of my sight. 
And say I find him. I will not ask for his tolerance.
I’ll ask for forgiveness. Or say we find
each other                                      

                          I will tell him: when our parents 
followed our brother into his danger, 
I'm sorry, yours was the available half 
of a love I didn’t know how to hold.