Lucia Anna and Anna Livia—Both Named by James Joyce

Dear Lucia—I’m writing to you

but you can’t answer.

You can’t answer but I am

writing to you. Because you

can’t answer, I am writing.

You were always standing at the window—

watching everyone you loved leaving.

Everyone you loved left. You were at the window

watching and you said you were always left

(always alone) like pigs in a sty.

A pig, a sty—those cramped and moldy rooms

where you had no privacy. Nowhere

to be alone to practice dance. But then you were alone.

Alone for thirty years. By the window.

Everyone agrees it all began when you threw a chair

at your mother. Maybe it was your diagnosis.

Or maybe you could no longer suffer

her disappointment. Your first memory—her voice

yelling about breaking the doll. The doll’s head

was broken. She said you broke it. (I would have thrown

a chair at her too if she were my mother.) She always

blamed you. You were always wrong wrong wrong.

Lucia, is it wrong how long I have grieved over you?

Thirty years and you are still surfacing.

I have stopped trying to ignore your voice.

I found the photo I taped on the nightstand

in my dorm room and fit it for a tarnished

silver frame. Your sideways stare looks into the distance.

Your father believed you were a genius.

I see you as he saw you—full of promise

and passion. I want to believe if he had not died,

he would have visited you. No one moved

like you—gold-beaded and fish-scaled sad, slow sorrow,

stealth of a beast. Beckett kept that photo of you

in his desk for sixty years though he visited you only once

in the sanatorium. In photographs, you are always looking

off to the side as if the world hurts too much to face.

Forced to give up dancing, you cried for a month.

Lucia, illuminator, maker of light.

Like the white marble statues unearthed in Greece

I cannot save you but I will not leave you. Your last decision

was to not be buried beside them. Come out

into the light, Lucia. Cut the phone wires. No one is listening.

Come home come home. Come home. Live here

with my wild girl—born eight years after I found you.

Dear Anna Livia—I’m writing to you

but you can’t answer.

You can’t answer but I am

writing to you. Because you

can’t answer, I am writing.

Your father wouldn’t bring you to the doctor

until you pulled the floor lamp down

and it shattered like our life around your two-year-old

body. Maybe it was your diagnosis.

Or maybe you could no longer suffer his disappointment.

Is your first memory your father’s voice, yelling?

He couldn’t believe you were not a genius.

That you wouldn’t be a doctor like him.

He always blamed you. You were always wrong

wrong wrong. Anna, is it wrong how long I have grieved over you?

You are always standing at the window—

watching everyone you love leaving.

Almost everyone you loved left. You are at the window

watching, it’s New York. Both of you—go now

to the window, sit on the bench and watch them walk away—

some for respite, some for a life without worry.

Watch them walk away from you, watch them

at the window while you ask for them. They do not

turn around after they leave. Your father

has not seen you in six years. He will never visit you again.

Anna, in photographs, you are always looking off to the side

as if the world hurts too much to face.

I cannot save you but I will not leave. Unable to sleep

in this musty apartment, I am coughing to death

as I watch over you—unable to decipher your cryptic chatter.

Lucia Anna—you’re still dancing low to the ground,

creeping across the floor, shoeless.

Anna Livia—you’re dancing, arms flailing,

the same way you move in water.

You both sprawl your letters across the table—painting,

talking to yourselves. I will never tell you to be quiet.

There is nothing that hurts me more than the sight

of your beautiful faces—your bobbed heads bent

over the alphabet, adding color to each corner

of the familiar shapes. Come home come home. Come home.