Spherical Eversion Poem by Diane Furtney

To myself, wondering whether it wouldn't be better to avoid
more sibling encounters—-just stop this sorry history, these
cross-purposes, this acrimony

It looked like acrimony,
like impatience and gratuitous, bony

betrayals. It sounded like calls
cut short, shouting in corridors, partial

apologies followed by sarcasm,
niched little silences for years, in terrorem

clauses, and the thrust of
more non-followings-through. So it was love

in process, stubborn love
using the engines of de-love

along the routes toward whatever re-love
there might be sudden room for. Shoves

from side to side: we were
girl-boy-girl-boy siblings, four,

trying quotidianly all our lives
to divide, with a blunted knife,

the single pea of parental
affect. It would all look, then, like maul

and mess, decade after decade of unclearness.
But it was always love, it was dearness,

dearness.
For each of us,

to reach a unique-enough location
would be like performing the eversion

of a sphere, for which a hypothesis
and imagination are required. Four successes

of a sort did result—-professionalisms
and non-insane citizenships, with our schisms

acknowledged and loudly called across
before the end of living. Too, there was

the occasional moment of mutual clarity
about the rules of living, which apply themselves with charity

rarely, rules austere as axioms, including
that we were curved parallel lines, each in

love's motion, which has to exclude reverse,
and that meet on the far side of the universe.

In SCIENCE AND, FutureCycle Press, Copyright © 2014 Diane Furtney
Finalist for The Marlboro Review Prize 2005; in No.20,2007