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Matilde, years or days sleeping, feverish, here or there, gazing off, twisting my spine, bleeding true blood, perhaps I awaken or am lost, sleeping: hospital beds, foreign windows, white uniforms of the silent walkers, the clumsiness of feet. And then, these journeys and my sea of renewal: your head on the pillow, your hands floating in the light, in my light, over my earth. It was beautiful to live when you lived! The world is bluer and of the earth at night, when I sleep enormous, within your small hands.

(after Albert Cook) All day, that is forever, they fall, leaves, pine needles, as blindly as hours into hours colliding, and the chill rain—what else do you expect of October?— spilling from one roof to another, like words from lips to lips, your long incertain say in all of this unsure of where the camera is and how the light is placed and what it is that’s ending.

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl— Life's little duties do—precisely As the very least Were infinite—to me— —Emily Dickinson, #443 My mother’s mother, widowed very young of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit, moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue and country heart anaesthetized and mute with labor. So her kind was taught to do— “Find work,” she would reply to every grief— and her one dictum, whether false or true, tolled heavy with her passionate belief. Widowed again, with children, in her prime, she spoke so little it was hard to bear so much composure, such a truce with time spent in the lifelong practice of despair. But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone, her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

Under dust plush as a moth’s wing, the book’s leather cover still darkly shone, and everywhere else but this spot was sodden beneath the roof’s unraveling shingles. There was that back-of-the-neck lick of chill and then, from my index finger, the book opened like a blasted bird.   In its box of familiar and miraculous inks, a construction of filaments and dust, thoroughfares of worms, and a silage of silverfish husks:   in the autumn light, eight hundred pages of perfect wordless lace.

The dead say little in their letters they haven't said before. We find no secrets, and yet how different every sentence sounds heard across the years. My father breaks my heart simply by being so young and handsome. He's half my age, with jet-black hair. Look at him in his navy uniform grinning beside his dive-bomber. Come back, Dad! I want to shout. He says he misses all of us (though I haven't yet been born). He writes from places I never knew he saw, and everyone he mentions now is dead. There is a large, long photograph curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago. My parents sit uncomfortably among tables of dark-suited strangers. The mildewed paper reeks of regret. I wonder what song the band was playing, just out of frame, as the photographer arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot? Get out there on the floor and dance! You don't have forever. What does it cost to send a postcard to the underworld? I'll buy a penny stamp from World War II and mail it downtown at the old post office just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve. Surely the ghost of some postal worker still makes his nightly rounds, his routine too tedious for him to notice when it ended. He works so slowly he moves back in time carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses. It's silly to get sentimental. The dead have moved on. So should we. But isn't it equally simple-minded to miss the special expertise of the departed in clarifying our long-term plans? They never let us forget that the line between them and us is only temporary. Get out there and dance! the letters shout adding,Love always. Can't wait to get home! And soon we will be.See you there.

Near dusk I find her in a newly mown field, lying still and face down in the coarse stubble. Her arms are splayed out on either side of her body, palms open and turned upward like two lilies, the slender fingers gently curling, as if holding onto something. Her legs are drawn up underneath her, as if she fell asleep there on her knees, perhaps while praying, perhaps intoxicated by the sweet liquid odor of sheared grass. Her small ankles, white and unscarred, are crossed one on top of the other, as if arranged so in ritual fashion. Her feet are bare. I cannot see her face, turned toward the ground as it is, but her long black hair is lovelier than I remember it, spilling across her back and down onto the felled stalks like a pour of glossy tar. Her flesh is smooth and cool, slightly resistant to my touch. I begin to look around me for something with which to carry her back—carry her back, I hear myself say, as if the words spoken aloud, even in a dream, will somehow make it possible. I am alone in a field, at dusk, the light leaving the way it has to, leaking away the way it has to behind a ridge of swiftly blackening hills. I lie down on the ground beside my mother under falling darkness and draw my coat over our bodies. We sleep there like that.

You find it when you’re tearing up your life, trying to make some sense of the old messes, moving dressers, peering under beds. Almost lost in cat hair and in cobwebs, in dust you vaguely know was once your skin, it shows up, isolated, fragmentary. A tidy little solid. Tractable. Knobbed to be fitted in a lock-step pattern with others. Plastic: red or blue or yellow. Out of the dark, undamaged, there it is, as bright and primary colored and foursquare as the family with two parents and two children who moved in twenty years ago in a dream. It makes no allowances, concedes no failures, admits no knowledge of a little girl who glared through tears, rubbing her slapped cheek. Rigidity is its essential trait. Likely as not, you leave it where it was.

The woods are the book we read over and over as children. Now trees lie at angles, felled by lightning, torn by tornados, silvered trunks turning back to earth. Late November light slants through the oaks as our small parade, father, mother, child, shushes along, the wind searching treetops for the last leaf. Childhood lies on the forest floor, not evergreen but oaken, its branches latched to a graying sky. Here is the scarf we left years ago like a bookmark, meaning to return the next day, having just turned our heads toward a noise in the bushes, toward the dinnerbell in the distance, toward what we knew and did not know we knew, in the spreading twilight that returns changed to a changed place.

If they, more petite than the mice whose flittings have pillaged their robes’ sparkled trim, stood tiptoe on the plumped felt tops of their thimble-sized footstools to scrutinize the worn fabric of this room’s blue distances, would they locate the source of lightning bolts in our faces’ wrinkled pleats and construe the stars’ dance from the tattered embroidery of our steps, or find in our seamless unravelling years the tissue of apocalypse?

Give me a few more hours to pass With the mellow flower of the elm-bough falling, And then no more than the lonely grass And the birds calling. Give me a few more days to keep With a little love and a little sorrow, And then the dawn in the skies of sleep And a clear to-morrow. Give me a few more years to fill With a little work and a little lending, And then the night on a starry hill And the road's ending.