To My Imaginary Siblings

Linda Pastan

Dear brother and sister,
you who helped me survive
the bleakness of my only childhood,
who were as real to me then
as the characters in my thumbed-over books:
are you grown now? Did one of you become
a surgeon, like our father, and do you both
still mirror our mother's severe beauty
which I endowed you with,
even though it passed me by?
I had my children early, thinking
they would be like my own siblings,
and though they never were,
in the busy boredom of domesticity
I somehow left the two of you behind.
If you were still around, would we chat
on the phone each morning in the warmth
of our separate cups of coffee?
Or would we have quarreled by now
over which of us was the more beloved
or over what our parents left us?
Would I have had to give one of you our mother's
opal stickpin and the other the two lusterware jugs
that sit in my kitchen now, remnants
of our childhood home -that antique house
where in the secular heaven of the remembered
family, you are simply two more ghosts?