The Elder Sister by Sharon Olds

When I look at my elder sister now

I think how she had to go first, down through the

birth canal, to force her way

head-first through the tiny channel,

the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,

the tight walls scraping her skin.

Her face is still narrow from it, the long

hollow cheeks of a crusader on a tomb,

and her inky eyes have the look of someone who has

been in prison a long time and

knows they can send her back. I look at her

body and think how her breasts were the first to

rise, slowly, like swans on a pond.

By the time mine came along, they were just

two more birds in the flock, and when the hair

rose on the white mound of her flesh, like

threads of water out of the ground, it was the

first time, but when mine came

they knew about it. I used to think

only in terms of her harshness, sitting and

pissing on me in bed, but now I

see I had her before me always

like a shield. I look at her wrinkles, her clenched

jaws, her frown-lines—I see they are

the dents in my shield, the blows that did not reach

me.

She protected me, not as a mother

protects a child, with love, but as a

hostage protects the one who makes her

escape as I made my escape, with my sister’s

body held in front of me.