To My Imaginary Siblings

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?